People’s tendency to engage in episodic future
thinking, and in turn the accuracy with which they
make predictions about future events, might also be
mediated by the temporal proximity of the target
event. Liberman and Trope have shown that
individuals represent distant future events at a more
abstract level than they do immediate future events,
even when the amount of information that they
possess about the event is held constant15,16.
Moreover, when planning for future events, people
tend to consider time constraints only when these
events are in the near future15. To our knowledge,
temporal proximity of the target event is not a
variable that has been considered in planning fallacy
research, but its manipulation might reveal that
people engage in more episodic future thinking when
the event looms nearer.