One country, two cultures: Implicit space–time mappings in Southern and Northern Vietnamese

Abstract

What determines how people implicitly associate the “past” and “future” with “front” and “back”? According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis (TFH), people's cultural attitudes toward time influence their implicit space–time mappings. However, previous research mainly used cross‐cultural comparison in which the cultures compared differ not only in attentional focus on temporal events, but may also differ in other cultural values. Thus, the specific role of cultural attitudes toward time has not been tested. In the current study, we compared Southern and Northern Vietnamese who have many aspects in common but demonstrate cultural differences in attitudes toward the past and future. The results showed that the two groups of participants tended to think about time according to their temporal focus. Taken together, this pattern of results showed that within‐cultural differences in temporal focus can also predict variation in space–time mappings, which provides further supporting evidence for the TFH.

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

“…, they can only be considered as cumulative, or complementary, in that they may well illustrate what Cumming (2014) coined as the dance of the CIs.In a nutshell, any sequence of an experiment replication will produce different p values as well as different confidence intervals. To test this, the current result were entered into a random-effects metaanalysis together with previous findings on the temporal focus index (i.e.,de la Fuente et al, 2014: Exp4;Li et al, 2018; Li & Cao, 2018b: Exp1; and our study: Exp1), although the questionnaire to measure temporal focus was not always the same. The Exploratory Software for Confidence Intervals (Cumming, 2013) yielded an integrated effect size that was medium to large, r = .58, 5 95% CI [.29,…”

“…Nevertheless, it is entirely possible that the degree of religious conviction/religiosity among Christians may play a role here, as it may be the case that our sample inadvertently included more religious Christians and/or fewer atheists, whereas de la Fuente et al's sample of Spaniards included more atheists and/or fewer religious Christians. Li and Cao (2018) found temporal focus shifts even in atheists when primed with religious prompts, but no study exists that has examined the effects of religiosity using the original temporal induction task by de la Fuente et al (2014), also used in this study. Clearly, the interplay between religious belief and cultural background in shifting temporal focus certainly warrants further exploration.…”

“…This issue is best approached by running a meta-analysis of the effects reported in previous studies, which produces a reliable indication of the overall strength of the effect of cultural attitudes on spatial mapping. For this purpose, we used the Exploratory Software for Confidence Intervals (Cumming, 2014) to run a random-effects meta-analysis 2 to integrate results from four experiments testing cross-cultural differences in front–back mapping (i.e., de la Fuente et al, 2014, Experiment 1; Gu et al, 2016, Experiment 1; Li et al, 2018, 3 and this study, Experiment 1). The integrated effect size was medium to large, d unbiased = .71, 95% CI = [0.01, 1.57], yet the CIs were indicative of a rather large heterogeneity of the effect.…”

“…The explanation here may lie on other cultural aspects or temporal experimental context. For example, Li and Cao (2018) found strong effects of religion on temporal focus (e.g., Taoists are more future-focused than Buddhists), and it is even the case that among Buddhists the extent of past or future focus can be modulated by a religion prime (Buddhists primed with Buddhas of the future are more future-focused than Buddhists primed with Buddhas of the past). It may well be the case that religious beliefs may affect the extent of the rapidly induced malleability of temporal focus, and one could attribute the lack of effect that we found in our populations to the fact that they are predominantly Christian, and therefore more future focused because of Christianity's emphasis on the second coming of Christ and the life ever after (this could be an additional factor on the Afrikaners participants' future in front predilection in the temporal diagram task -see previous paragraph).…”

“…An accumulating number of studies now suggest that temporal focus may successfully account for the spatialisation of time at the three crucial levels of analysis identified by Núñez et al (2012): At the highest level, temporal focus seems to explain cross-cultural variation in space–time associations, as seen in correlations reported between culture-specific temporal attitudes and front–back mappings (de la Fuente et al, 2014; Li, Bui, & Cao, 2018). 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).…”