Language Shapes People's Time Perspective and Support for Future‐Oriented Policies

Abstract

Can the way we speak affect the way we perceive time and think about politics? Languages vary by how much they require speakers to grammatically encode temporal differences. Futureless tongues (e.g., Estonian) do not oblige speakers to distinguish between the present and future tense, whereas futured tongues do (e.g., Russian). By grammatically conflating "today" and "tomorrow," we hypothesize that speakers of futureless tongues will view the future as temporally closer to the present, causing them to discount the future less and support future-oriented policies more. Using an original survey experiment that randomly assigned the interview language to Estonian/Russian bilinguals, we find support for this proposition and document the absence of this language effect when a policy has no obvious time referent. We then replicate and extend our principal result through a cross-national analysis of survey data. Our results imply that language may have significant consequences for mass opinion.

Rethinking time: Implications for well‐being

“…Researchers investigating the effects of language on how people behave shows that, compared to speakers of languages with a strong present‐future distinction, speakers of languages with a weaker present‐future distinction smoke less, practice safer sex, have lower obesity rates, and save more for retirement—all behaviors that have traditionally been described as “future‐oriented,” yet are clearly beneficial for the individual's well‐being both now and in the future (Chen, ). Building on these correlational findings, a recent investigation showed that when bilingual respondents answered a survey in a weak future tense language (Estonian) vs. a strong future tense language (Russian), they discounted the future less and supported future‐oriented policies more (Pérez & Tavits, ).…”

An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Psychological Impact of Different Grammaticalizations of the Future

“…Further, the LSH was confirmed by research concerning pro-environmental attitudes (Kim & Filimonau, 2017), environmental behavior and policies (Mavisakalyan et al, 2018) as well as future-oriented policies in general (Pérez & Tavits, 2017). Mavisakalyan et al, (2018), for example, followed Chen's (2003) setup, using panel data from the World Values Survey, finding speakers of weak FTR languages to be more willing to engage in costly pro-environmental actions, which was also evident across all countries (e.g., more climate change policies).…”

“…They found significantly higher pro-environmental attitudes in Mandarin speakers suggesting a higher perceived urgency in proenvironmental topics when speaking a weak FTR language (i.e., the future was perceived as being closer). Pérez and Tavits (2017) randomly assigned Russian-Estonian bilinguals to either submit a survey about a "green tax" in Russian or Estonian (strong vs. weak FTR respectively) and found that answering the Estonian questionnaire led to more support for the "green tax", even after controlling for political conviction.…”

Robust, Causal, and Incremental Approaches to Investigating Linguistic Adaptation

“…Overstated results and hasty adoption may be hard to overturn. The study above linking language to economic behavior (Chen, 2013 ) was quickly taken onboard by economists and the data has been reused (Santacreu-Vasut et al, 2014 ; Hicks et al, 2015 ; Pérez and Tavits, 2017 ), even though the original findings are now in doubt (Roberts et al, 2015 , though see Mavisakalyan and Weber, 2017 ). The solution may mean that researchers need to spend more time refining the communication of their research, especially to non-specialist audiences.…”