Future Tense and Economic Decisions: Controlling for Cultural Evolution

Abstract

A previous study by Chen demonstrates a correlation between languages that grammatically mark future events and their speakers' propensity to save, even after controlling for numerous economic and demographic factors. The implication is that languages which grammatically distinguish the present and the future may bias their speakers to distinguish them psychologically, leading to less future-oriented decision making. However, Chen's original analysis assumed languages are independent. This neglects the fact that languages are related, causing correlations to appear stronger than is warranted (Galton's problem). In this paper, we test the robustness of Chen's correlations to corrections for the geographic and historical relatedness of languages. While the question seems simple, the answer is complex. In general, the statistical correlation between the two variables is weaker when controlling for relatedness. When applying the strictest tests for relatedness, and when data is not aggregated across individuals, the correlation is not significant. However, the correlation did remain reasonably robust under a number of tests. We argue that any claims of synchronic patterns between cultural variables should be tested for spurious correlations, with the kinds of approaches used in this paper. However, experiments or case-studies would be more fruitful avenues for future research on this specific topic, rather than further large-scale cross-cultural correlational studies.

Migration as a Window into the Coevolution between Language and Behavior

“…We show that this approach is compatible to that of Roberts et al (2015), which controls for language relatedness. In particular, allowing the intercept as well as the slope of the relationship to vary, as a function of language structure and behavior, is feasible.…”

“…More concretely, it hinders our understanding of whether linguistic characteristics reflect changes in socio-economic relations and culture, whether they evolve independently, or even if they constraint and influence directly behavior. Roberts et al (2015) demonstrate that cross-cultural correlations involving languages may be spurious once these language dependencies are accounted for and propose a series of empirical tests to help address these features of language.…”

“…Consider the correlation between future time reference (FTR) in language and the propensity to save as examined in Chen (2013) and Roberts et al (2015). Assume that a correlation between the two exists.…”

“…Indeed, languages may be related in two ways: a common ancestor (vertical dependence) and language contact (horizontal dependence) as discussed by Roberts et al (2015). To account for the impact of language relatedness, we include a set of fixed effects for each language's family and linguistic area (Nichols et al 2013).…”

“…Third, Roberts et al (2015) argue that the strength of the correlation between a linguistic trait and a non-linguistic variable may itself be dependent on language relatedness. We can control for this dependence by including a set of interactions between each language's family and linguistic area, and the linguistic feature of interest itself.…”