Why to Start Considering Your Possible Selves

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Philosophers in the last century have often focused on "possible worlds": the many different ways the world could be. For example, we live in a world where there is oil in the Permian Basin, but we can imagine a world in which it contains only water. Psychologists have been more recently interested in a different notion, which is arguably even more significant: this is the idea of "possible selves."

The idea of possible selves is introduced in a now-famous 1986 paper by Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius. They introduce the idea to capture how our hopes and fears for ourselves are not abstract, but concrete and personal.

Their first example is a distinctively academic one: an associate professor carries with him or her much more than a shadowy, undifferentiated fear of not getting tenure. Instead, the fear is personalized, and the professor is likely to have a well-elaborated possible self that represents this fear—the self as having failed, as looking for another job, as bitter.

Possible selves give cognitive representation to the vague drives and urges that animate our motivational lives. They therefore constitute, write Markus and Nurius, "the essential link between self-concept and motivation."

The idea of possible selves, then, is that one has a thought or feeling about the alternatives that one faces, and that attitude is directed towards a non-actual but specific version of oneself. If I hope to get in better shape, my hope is directed towards a possible self—someone very much like myself, but fitter. If I fear getting sick, my fear is directed towards a possible self—someone like myself, but subject to the physical stresses of illness.

Our Possible Selves

Possible selves, so understood, have proven remarkably influential and fruitful in psychological research in the last several decades, figuring in accounts of emotions, motivation, self-knowledge, and much else. My impression, however, is that they remain relatively understudied in other domains, especially philosophical domains where one would expect their influence to be more widely felt. By this, I mean both philosophy itself, especially the philosophy of mind, and philosophically-informed clinical work. Let me take these in turn.

One perennial concern in philosophy has been to understand the objects of attitudes. When I hope to become a billionaire, what am I hoping for? Not me-as-billionaire—no such person exists. What then? The standard idea in philosophy has been that hope—as it is with emotions and cognitions more generally—is a "propositional attitude." The object of hope is a proposition, roughly the proposition expressed by "JTM is a billionaire."

There has been some strain felt in this edifice, especially around attitudes about oneself ("de se attitudes" in philosophical lingo), but it has generally held up reasonably well. Propositions, in turn, are understood in terms of possible worlds, which we introduced at the outset.

The possible selves framework suggests a very different picture. It suggests that attitudes like hope, at least in the case I described, are directed not at propositions but at specific but non-actual individuals: my possible selves. This is a different picture of the attitudes.

It is an interesting question (and to my knowledge, not one that has been thoroughly explored) how the "possible selves" conception of the attitudes compares to the propositional conception that has been standard in philosophy as well as linguistics: Are these rival pictures, or may they somehow be reconciled?

A Framework That Delivers

The possible selves framework also has the potential to influence philosophically informed clinical work. What is someone doing when she perseverates over a fear for herself, or a regret? The possible selves framework delivers a straightforward answer: She is focusing emotionally on a highly specific (though, again, non-actual) version of herself.

The possible selves framework suggests that the way to address these feelings is to address these representations—to ask, for example, whether they are realistic, or whether there are nearby possible selves that are more likely, and perhaps more hopeful. These are questions that an intuitive clinician will be asking anyway, but the idea of possible selves provides a theoretical structure to undergird such an approach.

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But the ultimate reason for attending more carefully to possible selves is not the utility of this way of thinking for psychological or philosophical research, but the light it sheds on one's own emotional life. When one regrets something they neglected to do, for example, it is useful to ask: What exactly am I thinking about, since the choice or event I am regretting did not happen?

The possible selves approach suggests that I am thinking not of an absence but of a particular kind of presence: the self I would be, had I not made the regretted choice. This insight does not by itself soften the pangs of regret, but it may at least bring them into better focus, and so perhaps suggest a way of reducing them. That, at least, is one promise of thinking in terms of our possible selves.

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