By Hengchen Dai
Our modern culture often explores the belief that subjective perceptions of time do not always perfectly reflect the actual trajectory of time. For example, in the movie The Time Traveler’s Wife, the theme of time being up to an individual’s perception is manifested as Henry DeTamble has the past, present and future all simultaneously occurring. For Clare, his beloved wife who spent most of her life waiting for Henry, time always moves painfully slowly. “I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way,” she says, suggesting that the perceived distance between two points in time depends more on her internal clock than on the objective passage of time. Building on the notion that time perception is subjective and malleable, four research projects presented by me and three other researchers in a symposium at SPSP 2014 highlighted several factors that affect time perceptions and demonstrated implications of non-linear time perceptions for intertemporal choices and goal pursuit.
Jochim Hansen (University of Salzburg) started the session by talking about how “time flies” when a person mentally represents a situation in a more concrete (versus abstract) manner. A concrete mental construal of events features rich details and contextual information, whereas an abstract mental construal highlights the essential and global aspects of events. In his paper, published with Yaacov Trope, Hansen showed that when people are led to process information concretely (versus abstractly), they tend to perceive time as passing more quickly. Interestingly, the “acceleration effect” of concrete mindsets on time estimation is more substantial when actual changes in one’s environments take place at a local level (e.g., when the font of a text varies), but is weakened or even reversed when actual changes in one’s environments are more abstract and global (e.g., when the content of a text varies). When concluding his presentation, Hansen speculated that these findings may have downstream consequences for people’s enjoyment of various activities, which might be a valuable future research avenue.
Moving beyond time perceptions of present situations, Eugene Caruso (University of Chicago) next talked about theTemporal Doppler Effect which pertains the past, present, and future. People do not simply “live in the moment” but frequently reflect upon past experiences and anticipate upcoming events. Caruso and his co-authors Leaf Van Boven, Mark Chin, and Andrew Ward investigated the intriguing question: Which seems closer to present time, the future or the past? Across four studies, Caruso presented consistent evidence that future times (e.g., 1 year, 1 month) or events (e.g., Valentine’s Day) are perceived as closer than past events of equivalent objective distance. For example, Valentine’s Day was seen as closer one week before the date than one week after. Caruso proposed that the underlying mechanism of such a temporal asymmetry is akin to that of the Doppler Effect in auditory perceptions: Future (past) events approach (recede) us and are associated with diminishing (increasing) temporal distance, thus feel psychologically closer (more distant). Consistent with this hypothesis, Caruso found that when participants in an experiment moved backward through virtual space and presumably had their natural temporal movement reversed, they no longer exhibited the asymmetry in past-future temporal judgments.
In the next talk, Sam Maglio (University of Toronto) shared his recent research with Hal Hershfield on how people think about the dividing line between the present and future as well as the implications of the present-future divide for intertemporal choices. According to Maglio, there are considerable differences in how long individuals think the present lasts: the present is as long as a split second for some people, while for others, the present is longer than a year. Maglio found that people who were inclined to see the present as ending sooner were more patient when making intertemporal tradeoffs. Furthermore, Maglio demonstrated that the point at which the present ends and the future begins can be externally shifted. In one experiment, participants perceived the present to end sooner after they viewed an ad emphasizing that “There is no present, there is only the future,” compared with before they viewed the ad. In a follow-up experiment, Maglio showed that experimentally shrinking the present increased people’s intention to make long-term financial plans. This finding is consistent with recent research showing that individuals are more patient when they feel more connected with their future self. As Maglio mentioned at the end of his talk, it would be valuable to examine whether moving the line between the present and future can affect other future-oriented decisions (e.g., eating healthy food, quitting smoking), which has important policy implications.
In the final talk of this symposium, I demonstrated the implications of time perception for self-control from a different perspective. Specifically, I am interested in whether there are naturally-arising points in time when people are particularly motivated to pursue their long-term interests and engage in “aspirational behaviors” (or behaviors that people aspire to undertake and that can help them achieve their goals). I addressed this question in two papers together with my coauthors Katherine Milkman and Jason Riis. Inthe first paper forthcoming at the Management Science, we analyzed three archival data sets and provided evidence of a “fresh start effect” whereby aspirational behaviors (dieting, exercising, and goal pursuit) increase following temporal landmarks (e.g., the outset of a new week, month, year, or semester; right after birthdays and holidays). Importantly, in one study, we examined a wide range of goals (e.g., pertaining to education, health, finance, etc.) that Internet users committed to pursuing on a goal-setting website (www.stickK.com). We found that the fresh start effect persists for both health-irrelevant goals (e.g., career and education goals) and health-relevant goals (e.g., weight loss), suggesting that our findings are not merely the result of individuals’ efforts to rebalance health after over-indulging. In the second paper (part of which I briefly presented in the symposium), we elucidated one mechanism underlying the fresh start effect: temporal landmarks demarcate the passage of time and psychologically distance the current self from the past self; this relegates one’s imperfections to the past and motivates the current self to pursue one’s aspirations. We support this explanation with laboratory studies that manipulated the psychological meaningfulness of temporal landmarks and directly measured the subjective distance between people’s post-landmark self and pre-landmark self.
Although there are always 24 hours in a day and 60 minutes in an hour, the subjective distance between two points in time does not always mirror the actual time passed. These four talks highlight that our subjective time perceptions are constantly shaped by our environments and in turn shift our current experiences and decisions. Further, the findings presented in this symposium suggest potential “nudge” techniques that policy makers and managers can leverage to facilitate far-sighted decision making among individuals with malleable time perceptions.
Hengchen Dai is a 4th year Ph.D. student in the Operations and Information Management Department at the Wharton School. Her research applies insights from behavioral economics and psychology to motivate people to pursue their long-term best-interests both inside and outside of the workplace. You can find out more about Hengchen and her research here and contact her at [email protected].