Cognitive and decision-making psychology has identified several robust cognitive biases and heuristics (for larger scale replications, see, e.g., work by Gilad Feldman or the experimental economics replication project) with applicability to reasoning about existential risk and longtermism. For example, deliberate ignorance could be studied as a potential mechanism for why people neglect existential risk, interventions against scope insensitivity could be generalised to make people more aware of the scope of the long term future, and existing work on temporal discounting could be applied to understand how people value the long-term future.

Several areas in social psychology have implications for reasoning about existential risks and longtermism. For example, intergenerational public goods games have been used to study how people deplete resources that could be used by future generations, a line of research that can be extended to existential risk; moral psychology has a variety of relevant applications, such as people’s intuitions about population ethics; and climate psychology has identified interventions to increase climate change awareness that could be applied to other existential risks (however, see a recent meta-analysis that suggests effect sizes are small).

The research agenda ‘Psychology for Effectively Improving the Future‘ also suggests many research questions, such as:

• How do people think about risks that could permanently curtail the future of humanity? Do people underestimate or overestimate such risks? Do they underappreciate the importance of mitigating such risks?
• What do people think about emerging technologies that have the potential to cause global catastrophic risks? Are they too optimistic or pessimistic relative to the views of experts? What drives these attitudes?
• What do people think about human extinction and the future of humanity? Do people find human extinction good or bad, and why? Do people find it morally important to safeguard the future of humanity?