People tend to focus on the short term due to biases like presentism and availability heuristics (favoring familiar and easily recalled information).
Foresight methods, such as Scenario Planning and Future Design, help individuals overcome these biases and think about the future more effectively.
Scenario planning is a method for envisioning multiple plausible futures to improve present-day decision-making. Future design is a method that asks participants to mentally time travel and adopt the perspective of a future generation. It emphasizes personal values and intergenerational responsibility, encouraging decision-makers to prioritize long-term sustainability.
Futures empathy is the thought that we can actually care about people and situations in the future, rather than simply thinking about the future in a more abstract way. We use it to imagine and emotionally engage with a future world.
Building futures empathy would seem to me to be a good way to get past our tendency to think in the short term.
Lambert, Lauren M., Cynthia Selin, and Tom Chermack. “Futures Empathy for Foresight Research and Practice.” Futures 163 (October 1, 2024): 103441. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2024.103441.