Let’s Not Tempt Fate: The Influence of Future Time-Orientation, Fatalism, and Superstition on Willingness to Report Expectations about Future Health

This article examines individuals’ likelihood of engaging in future health prediction as a function of their fatalism, future time orientation, superstition, and history of chronic disease. Using a multistage cluster sample of 33 urban cities in Turkey, we asked respondents ( N = 1,467), to report their past and current health and predict their future (expected) health status (i.e., future self-rated health). While less than 1% failed to report past or current health, 23% of respondents provided no prediction for their future health status. We employed a moderated-mediation analysis to identify the predictors of this avoidance of reporting future health status expectations. Our analyses point to two potentially distinct mechanisms influencing individuals’ likelihood of providing future self-rated health. First, individuals suffering from a chronic disease were more likely to have higher fatalism, which, in turn, decreased their likelihood of providing a rating for their future health. Second, more superstitious individuals were less likely to report expectations about future health. This association was moderated by future time orientation such that for individuals with higher future time orientation (vs. present time orientation), higher superstition was associated with a steeper increase in the probability of avoidance of future health predictions. This finding suggests that some individuals might avoid sharing predictions about their future health because they fear talking about future outcomes can invite negative outcomes by “tempting fate.” Plain language summary This article looks at why some people might not want to report their predictions about their future health in surveys. We studied how people’s beliefs, thinking about the future, superstitions, and past health issues are connected to this tendency of some individuals to avoid reporting their expected future health. We asked people in 33 cities in Turkey about their health in the past, present, and what they expect in the future. Large majority of people answered the questions about their past and present health, but about a quarter didn’t answer the question about their future health. We found that people with ongoing health problems felt more fatalistic, and that made them less likely to predict their future health. Also, people who believed in superstitions were less likely to predict their future health, especially if they thought a lot about the future. This could be because they worried