Does time extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? A multitask crosscultural study

Abstract

Does temporal thought extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? Do asymmetries depend on cultural differences in temporal focus? Some studies suggest that people in Western (arguably future-focused) cultures perceive the future as being closer, more valued, and deeper than the past (a future asymmetry), while the opposite is shown in East Asian (arguably past-focused) cultures. The proposed explanations of these findings predict a negative relationship between past and future: the more we delve into the future, the less we delve into the past. Here, we report findings that pose a significant challenge to this view. We presented several tasks previously used to measure temporal asymmetry (self-continuity, time discounting, temporal distance, and temporal depth) and two measures of temporal focus to American, Spanish, Serbian, Bosniak, Croatian, Moroccan, Turkish, and Chinese participants (total N = 1,075). There was an overall future asymmetry in all tasks except for temporal distance, but the asymmetry only varied with cultural temporal focus in time discounting. Past and future held a positive (instead of negative) relation in the mind: the more we delve into the future, the more we delve into the past. Finally, the findings suggest that temporal thought has a complex underlying structure.

The role of spatial words in the spatialisation of time

“…We calculated the TFI of our participants using the same (future mean—past mean)/(future mean + past mean) formula used in de la Fuente et al (2014). The Temporal Focus Scale has been validated in Turkish (Arslan & Bayraktar, 2021) and used in similar studies that also include a Turkish sample along with the TFQ (Callizo-Romero et al, 2022; de la Fuente et al, 2014). The scale has also been used in different studies regarding temporal focus both in terms of space–time mappings (Li & Cao, 2018) and in different areas like consumer decision making (Rai & Lin, 2018).…”

Time to get attention: The effect of temporal focus on health, income and happiness

“…In particular, recent research shows that there is no effect of linguistic grammar of future time references on the perceived distance of future events (Jä ggi et al, 2022), and several studies, including a re-analysis of Chen's original data set ( see Roberts, Winters, & Chen, 2015) as well as lab experiments, failed to replicate Chen's (2013) hypothesis (Chen, He & Riyanto, 2019;Thoma & Tytus, 2017). In addition, although there are studies showing that time perspective and temporal focus scale correlate to futureoriented planning or behaviour, few studies have investigated the influence of general temporal values on such aspects (Callizo-Romero et al, 2022). The study of the effect of cultural temporal focus on monetary values by Guo et al (2012) in fact did not test participants' temporal focus.…”