Life is so Short, Future is so Long: The Relationship between Life History Strategies and People’s Metaphorical Perspectives on Time

Abstract

Accruing evidence has attested to the plasticity of people’s metaphorical perspectives on the movement of events in time, which oscillate between the ego-moving perspective and the time-moving perspective contingent on, among others, perception of distance to the future by virtue of individual differences in lifestyle and personality. Building on and extending this avenue of inquiry, the current research investigated the relationship between life history strategy, another time-related construct, and the preferred perspective in the resolution of a temporally ambiguous question. Studies based on self-report (Study 1) and behavioral (Study 2) measures showed consistent results, such that individuals with a fast life history strategy and those who preferred the smaller-sooner reward tended to adopt the ego-moving perspective, whereas individuals with a slow life history strategy and those who preferred the larger-later reward tended to adopt the time-moving perspective. Examination of the priming effect of temporal perspectives on intertemporal decision-making revealed that differential perceptions of temporal distance underlay the strategy-time relationship (Study 3). Taken as a whole, the current findings suggested that individual differences in life history strategy may also influence people’s preferred perspective in the interpretation of ambiguous language related to time.