Who Cares About The Future?

Pondering human evolutionary dynamics, I wondered what people want to pass on to their future. So I collected 32 options and did 24 polls asking “what do you most try to promote/grow with your actions”. From 2932 responses, I got these relative priorities:

Note: you have to go pretty far down this list to get to items with a plausible story for how the usual ways that people promote such things could have much long term impact. Items like: Family (#8), Nation (#10), DNA (#11), Nation alliance (#14). So I wondered: how do people plan to influence the other items? To learn that, I picked 16 plausible influencers and asked: 

In recent polls, top things (TT) folks wanted to promote included: deep values (#2), intellectual opinions (#3), moral norms (#5), inquiry priorities (#6). But what OTHER things do you promote now, as a means to promote these TT after you die? 

I got only 287 responses, from which I (more noisily) estimate these priorities: 

These results seem easiest to explain as people not so much trying to influence the future, as just doing stuff to promote what they care about now, such as themselves, their family, and a bit their nation and political alliance. To test this, I asked directly.

First I asked re the top things (TT) of the last polls, “what % of your effort re such things is re promoting such things after you die, as oppose to while you live?” And then I just asked “Regarding all of your choices, how much relative weight do you put on stuff that will happen after you die?” The second version got far more responses (531 vs 80), but both gave the exact same (lognormal fit) median answer: 3.3%. 

Then I wondered how much of this do things to influence stuff after you die is just regarding your kids, etc. So I split this into:

Regarding all of your choices, how much relative weight do you put on stuff that will happen after you die, 

to people OTHER THAN your kids, neices, nephews, or grandkids? [Median: 1.2%]

TO YOUR your kids, nieces, nephews, or grandkids?   [Median: 9.4%]

(Theses got 232, 219 responses respectively.)

So prompting people to think about kids, etc. instead of a category that included but didn’t mention them caused a big “sub-additivity effect”, increasing its assigned weight. In such cases answers re the bigger category tend to be more accurate.

I conclude:

While people may wish that things like their value, intellectual, moral, and inquiry views will grow in the future, their actions are mostly done to promote themselves, and to a lesser extent their family, politics, and nation today. Regarding stuff that happens after they die, they care a fair bit about their kids, grandkids, nieces, and nephews, but little (<~1%) about anything else.