Karma or Immortality: Can Religion Influence Space‐Time Mappings?

Abstract

People implicitly associate the "past" and "future" with "front" and "back" in their minds according to their cultural attitudes toward time. As the temporal focus hypothesis (TFH) proposes, future-oriented people tend to think about time according to the future-in-front mapping, whereas past-oriented people tend to think about time according to the past-in-front mapping (de la Fuente, Santiago, Román, Dumitrache, & Casasanto, 2014). Whereas previous studies have demonstrated that culture exerts an important influence on people's implicit spatializations of time, we focus specifically on religion, a prominent layer of culture, as potential additional influence on space-time mappings. In Experiment 1 and 2, we observed a difference between the two religious groups, with Buddhists being more past-focused and more frequently conceptualizing the past as ahead of them and the future as behind them, and Taoists more future-focused and exhibiting the opposite space-time mapping. In Experiment 3, we administered a religion prime, in which Buddhists were randomly assigned to visualize the picture of the Buddhas of the Past (Buddha Dipamkara) or the Future (Buddha Maitreya). Results showed that the pictorial icon of Dipamkara increased participants' tendency to conceptualize the past as in front of them. In contrast, the pictorial icon of Maitreya caused a dramatic increase in the rate of future-in-front responses. In Experiment 4, the causal effect of religion on implicit space-time mappings was replicated in atheists. Taken together, these findings provide converging evidence for the hypothesized causal role of religion for temporal focus in determining space-time mappings.

Which Is in Front of Chinese People, Past or Future? The Effect of Language and Culture on Temporal Gestures and Spatial Conceptions of Time

“…Indeed, some recent studies have shown that individuals' temporal focus and the corresponding space–time mappings are also affected by such factors, as whether one is pregnant, whether one's religious belief is Buddhism or Taoism, and whether the temporal diagram task is conducted at the beginning of a new year or on the Tomb Sweeping Day, etc. (Li & Cao, , , ).…”

“…Another recent study, Bylund et al (2019), even failed to find evidence at a cross-cultural level. (Li & Cao, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c. Thus, it appears that the significant relationship between temporal-focus and sagittal space-time mappings may not be found in some cases.…”

“…A temporal performance task, adapted from de la Fuente et al (2014)'s temporal diagram task, was used to examine Chinese people's space-time mappings. This task has been shown to be an efficient and reliable paradigm to test people's sagittal mental space-time mappings in several cross-cultural studies (e.g., Casasanto, 2009;de la Fuente et al, 2014;Li & Cao, 2018a, 2018b, and it is more explicit than our gesture study in Experiment 1 about people's mental representations.…”

“…Second, to corroborate the patterns of space–time mappings observed from spontaneous gestures, we will adopt a temporal performance task in Experiment 2, which has been used in several previous studies to explicitly test people's mental space–time mappings (e.g., de la Fuente et al, ; Li & Cao, , ). Particularly, we are interested in whether these mappings are affected by different space–time metaphors.…”

Back to the future? The role of temporal focus for mapping time onto space

“…At the intermediate level of analysis, temporal focus seems to account for individual variation within cultures, as seen in differences in mappings associated with pregnancy, age, and circadian rhythm (de la Fuente et al, 2014; Li, 2018; Li & Cao, 2018b). Finally, at the finest level of analysis, that of moment-to-moment variability within individuals, changes induced in temporal focus have been reported to trigger corresponding changes in front–back mappings (de la Fuente et al, 2014; Li & Cao, 2018a).…”