Six Worlds of Tomorrow
Images of the future are presented to popular culture not as academic studies, but as stories in various literary and cinematic forms. Six generic narrative visions of the future are identified: progress and utopia, anti-utopia, dystopia, conflict and revolution, collapse, and apocalypse. These narrative accounts have the power to inspire and excite action through psychological processes described here. Given this potential, it is important to be able to critique the simplistic thinking about the future that such visions represent. One generic criticism reviewed here is historicism; beyond that, each paradigmatic vision is critiqued specifically on its own terms. The potential biasing effects of these paradigms on future studies is considered.