Calibration of retrospective and prospective life satisfaction judgments around the world

It is a physical fact that humans have access to records of the past but not of the future and that this creates an epistemic asymmetry in time. We explore the epistemic asymmetry, hypothesizing that retrospection about past psychological states is less biased than prospection about future states. Leveraging data from the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project, involving 61,271 participants across 34 countries, we examined the calibration and bias of individuals' assessments of past and future life satisfaction relative to present assessments. A multi-method analysis contrasted individual and national-level evaluations of life satisfaction across two waves, five years apart, with numerous control variables to account for potential confounding factors. Results confirmed miscalibration in prospective judgments of future life satisfaction, whereas retrospective judgments of past life satisfaction showed no meaningful miscalibration. This supports a psychological effect of the physical arrow of time on human judgment, robust across diverse samples worldwide.