Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –
Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –
Vladimir Dimidov studies positive psychology and explores the problem of time perspective. In an interview with the Young Scientists of the Higher School of Economics project, he explained why we should think about the future, how to prevent burnout, and which places on Lake Baikal are worth visiting.
How I got into science
At the age of four, I wanted to become an inventor. That’s probably where it all started. I tried myself in different fields – electronics, robotics. Then I realized that something humanitarian was closer to me. I tried to become a writer. Then I entered psychology and already in my second year I met Oksana Vladimirovna Zashchirinskaya, a doctor of psychological sciences and professor at St. Petersburg State University. She was the first person who had no doubts about my successful scientific future. And in my fourth year, having worked indirectly on scientific projects, I began to look for a specific place, a research institute, where I would like to work.
Where did I end up?
I work at the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation. Positive psychology is a global trend in personality psychology that deals with the problems of happiness and meaning. My scientific supervisor Dmitry Alekseevich Leontiev is a leading scientist, as well as the grandson of the famous Soviet psychologist Alexei Nikolaevich Leontiev and one of his direct followers.
There is no other place like this in Russia. On the one hand, it is a hereditary, generational, real scientific school. On the other hand, Dmitry Alekseevich is one of the world-class scientists, and he transmits his knowledge to us. This is probably the most valuable experience that can be gained here.
What I am researching
Time perspective. Understanding what time perspective is is a separate theoretical task. On the one hand, it can be understood that a person is not only focused on the present, but also looks to the past and the future. In other approaches, time perspective is precisely the perspective of the future, a cognitive-motivational formation consisting of a person’s goals, aspirations, hopes, and fears.
I suppose that time perspective plays a certain role in the regulation of behavior. Let’s take spirituality, for example. How does it enter our lives? I think through time perspective. Experiments will show whether this is true. But there is an assumption that higher behavior regulators (for some it is God, for others it is morality) appear in our lives precisely because we have a future, we think about the consequences of our actions.
Time Perspective Effects
People who have a time perspective are less susceptible to momentary emotions; their happiness depends less on the peak of experiences here and now, and more on meanings.
In other words, if a person has a goal in the distant future, he may be more resistant to frustration.
Such a goal could be, for example, defending a dissertation. What distinguishes science from other areas is the need to plan, including your defense. And people who plan better, build a path to their goal, have a more detailed time perspective.
The lack of a time perspective can have very serious consequences. Suicide is committed by people who have lost their sense of purpose, and the first sign may be that a person has no purpose in life. Alcoholism is also one of the signs of a lack of meaning. A person’s sense system is simplified. Because of this, he becomes more dependent on momentary desires. His illness or tendency to drink alcohol intensifies. Because this intensifies, his sense system is simplified. All this takes on a pathological character.
How my research is structured
One of the specific hypotheses I want to test is that time perspective is a specific phenomenon that separates meaning from happiness. In statistical terms, we can say that there is a moderation effect: the correlation either increases or decreases when we introduce time perspective. In the example of happiness and meaning, their relationship should be lower. Let’s say they correlate at 0.7, but when we introduce time perspective into the model, they start to correlate at 0.4. This means that the relationship is destroyed, reduced.
The main study looks standard: I recruit a certain sample (about two hundred people) so that the study has sufficient power. This sample must be homogeneous. Then I conduct a set of tests. Most of them I still have to develop or test in Russian.
And then a certain structural model is built, in which there is happiness and positive emotions, there is meaning and time perspective. Within the framework of the dissertation, there will be a number of other important variables. By analyzing the indicators, we can assume whether time perspective plays a role or not.
What I am proud of
By not spreading myself too thin. I can do a lot in science or in the academic environment right now, but I try to concentrate on my dissertation, on distant goals.
There is one achievement. I opened a student research project group at the Faculty of Social Sciences. We worked for a year and conducted a number of interesting studies. This was my first experience of management. I won’t say that I am proud of it, but overall I consider this enterprise successful.
We developed the issue of goal setting. We asked people how they think about goals, set goals, why, where it all starts, what difficulties there are in this process. The results are reflected in the article “Subjective experience of goal setting”, which will soon be published in the journal “World of Psychology” by my colleagues who worked with me. This process is described there in sufficient detail. We also created a test on involvement in the goal and conducted a number of tests.
What We Learned About Goal Setting
We conducted two studies. They were on maximally similar samples. But at the same time, we gave some people the freedom to write down their goals, and others were asked to choose from aspirations that had been empirically identified over decades of research. And we looked at what role meaning plays.
It turned out that people who wrote down their goals themselves had one structure of involvement in these goals, but when we gave them the aspirations ourselves, the picture was different.
In theory, these aspirations are divided into internal and external. Internal ones are, for example, the desire for self-development, external ones are the desire to look attractive. We thought that the structures for internal and external goals would differ. It turned out that the structure in each specific case will be its own.
Some goals bring inspiration, a person gets energy from this inspiration and gets involved. Some goals do not bring inspiration at all, but motivate a person to work on themselves. And this structure in this case depends on the meaning of the goal. My dissertation will have a higher level of generalization: it is not about specific goals, but in principle about the time perspective.
For example, does a person consider his future limited, if he feels that he may not have as long to live as he would like, most of his life has been lived. Or, on the contrary, the future is open, a person does not know how much longer he will live, and wants to set goals for a long, long time.
My dream as a scientist
I have a distant goal – to found an institute. An institute in the broadest sense – it can be an educational institution or a laboratory.
I could say that it is a dream. But it is not a dream, it is a goal. And there are also things that can be called fantasies. For example, if we talk about the state of psychology and science in Russia, I have a fantasy that scientists will become a little more immersed in science. So far, this has not happened.
Science is very fluid, very fast. You have to keep up with it.
You need to be aware of the current state of science, read articles that are published in your field here and now. For example, in 2024, article in the journal “Neuro”. Neurophysiologists, based on experiments with rats, put forward the initial provisions that the functioning of consciousness can be explained by quantum dualism.
Ideally, people who study the psychology of consciousness can mobilize and begin research based on this article. But only a few will do it. These same few will be cited. These same few will set trends for other scientists. And other scientists will come to this in years, when quantum dualism may no longer be so relevant.
Before I came to my topic, I wrote probably a dozen research projects, and each topic was closer and closer to what we have now.
And I see a certain gap between what we do and what our closest colleagues do – psychologists from all over Russia. They use a methodology that is significantly behind. They write research for the drawer. As a scientist, I dream that in Russia the gap between provincial and metropolitan science would be smaller (although, as my scientific supervisor says, there is most provincial science in Moscow – unfortunately, this is true). I want general competence to grow.
What areas of science could I study?
The parts of science are closely integrated into each other. From the topic of time perspective, I can move, for example, to the topic of the temporal aspect of consciousness, to talk about how consciousness here and now, consciousness that unfolds further, provides us with a state in the flow of time, the flow of life. This is close to my topic, but already a different area. And I see this as a topic for tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow I will get a grant on this topic, or maybe no one will need it, and I will turn in another direction.
First of all, science is a worldview. I began to notice that as I delved into the scientific field, my thinking changed greatly. And this can even lead to conflicts with colleagues who are poorly integrated into science. For example, the question of truth.
The scientist does not know the truth. He strives for it, but he will never know it. He gradually gains power over certain pieces of reality. And such a shaky one that perhaps a new study will refute it, and he will have to adapt to it. He has to think in changeable categories, to build his worldview on the fact that, in essence, nothing is true. And if it is true, then there must be numbers, there must be statistics – in statistical sciences, and in empirical science there must be an empirical base that confirms this. And even a series of confirmations does not give the scientist the right to think that this is so.
More reliable data is a refutation of something. If it were shown on mice, humans and dolphins that there is no quantum dualism, we could say with more certainty that consciousness is still something different, but not like that. And we could study it further.
If I hadn’t become a scientist
I could become a writer, a cyberneticist, a philosopher, a data scientist. All of this is useful to me even in my work. I can easily immerse myself in philosophical and psychological research. Data Science is how we conduct research. Of course, prose would probably be more difficult for me to write than scientific articles, but I would manage. Perhaps poetry is not my thing, but who knows…
How I use artificial intelligence
For data analysis, we can only use artificial intelligence to a limited extent now, because the scientific community is not yet accustomed to it. For example, I can process data using machine learning, but it should be an analogue of an existing statistical method that we can do manually. So that if we publish an article, reviewers understand it.
Personally, I discuss models with artificial intelligence. For example, we have a task to develop a test of time perspective. I have a certain set of variable characteristics: some were identified in a literature review, others in another study of mine. You can generalize this yourself in one way – theoretically. You can generalize it empirically, conduct a study if there are suitable methods. Or you can discuss it with artificial intelligence, giving it certain instructions.
For example, in terms of time perspective, I have 15 different characteristics. I can’t measure them all in a dissertation, it would be too much. They are from different theories, some of them intersect, some don’t. Discussing this with artificial intelligence, I can identify a more coherent structure, say, of four components.
Artificial intelligence is very good at identifying what are called in statistics orthogonal and oblique structures, that is, things that are definitely not correlated, and things that are weakly or strongly correlated.
Who would I like to meet?
With positive psychologist Robert Emmons. He is an American fundamental psychologist who studied the problems of personal aspirations, wrote about spirituality and religiosity. At the turn of the 2000s, he studied human goals. This is close to what I do. And recently – for more than ten years – he has been studying the problem of gratitude (whether it is an emotion or religious gratitude to God). I would ask him – why. I consider him a genius, but why he chose this direction, I still do not understand.
Emmons’s graduate student was Ken Sheldon, who at one time worked as the scientific director of our laboratory. He is still an invisibly present at HSE, as his goal self-concordance model sometimes pops up – a model of the correspondence of goals with the interests, values and needs of the individual.
How my typical day is structured
Every day is like a new one, everything is different. The only thing is that every evening I walk the dog, and I periodically start the morning with pancakes that my girlfriend makes. I really love them.
Do I get burnout?
As I have noticed, scientists work in cycles. I am also starting to experience this, but I do not have burnout as such. There is simply a deterioration in my general condition, but I know very well how to deal with it. You need to do what you love. If I am currently doing work that is not interesting to me, I can put it aside and spend half an hour doing something that I enjoy.
Science has helped me even in difficult moments in my life. I could miss the whole day due to various events. Feel tired all evening. Not sleep until 4am. But at 4am I would sit down to do science, and my life would become better.
What are my hobbies besides science?
I do sports. In the warm season, I like to go to the horizontal bars. Often with friends. I love my friends very much. Most of them are also connected with science. My best friend, with whom I have been friends since school, is involved in cybersecurity. He is also a graduate student. So in any free moment I try to meet with one of them. Or at least call, if a friend is from another city.
What does sport give?
Sport is a great tonic, changes the physiological state of the body. Beneficial hormones and hormones of happiness are produced. Sport stabilizes the nervous system, strengthens certain neural connections in the brain due to muscle innervation. And it improves your mood!
What I read recently
Nassim Taleb’s book “The Statistical Consequences of Fat Tails”. It is very critical of statistics in the social sciences. And, frankly, it is impossible not to agree with it.
When collecting data, we work with a certain set of data as normally distributed indicators. We proceed from the assumption that everything we have received is subject to certain statistical laws.
When we get a normal distribution, we know what to do with it. But if the distribution deviates from the normal, we don’t know how to work with that yet.
“Fat tails” are just one of the signs that something deviates from the normal.
Taleb wrote a book based on several dissertations and a number of articles by statisticians. It says that the distribution will most often be different. Most often it will obey other laws, not those we rely on. But we will work, closing our eyes to this. That’s how I was taught, that’s how everyone is taught now.
If we admit that the book is telling the truth, we will have to admit that we can’t do anything. Statisticians should teach us (scientists who use applied statistics) to work with other data distributions. And they themselves can’t work with all types of distributions.
Advice to young scientists
Among young scientists, especially among my peers, the issue of earning money is acute. If you want to earn money, go into business or management. If you are a person of the heart, then go where your heart leads you. But remember that only the best of the best will earn money doing what you really like.
Favorite place in Moscow
I really like the Gorka Park with its sports ground under Maroseyka, not far from the Vyshka. And I like the park on Vorobyovy Gory, there is the Luzhniki sports complex nearby, you can work out on the horizontal bars and then walk along the embankment with friends.
Favorite place in Irkutsk
In Irkutsk, where I was born and raised, there are also two wonderful embankments. Not far from Irkutsk is Baikal, if you go to a non-tourist place, everything there is wonderful.
I like the town of Slyudyanka in the south of Baikal. It is equidistant from the Buryat centers of attraction and Irkutsk. I have relatives there. And Baikal there is exactly the kind that is remembered: nature, beaches, mountains.
I also love the village of Staraya Angasolka, located on the Circum-Baikal Railway. In 1926, Nikolai Roerich passed through this station, and now there is a museum to him there.
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