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Last week we had a presentation by Keith Chen, who you may remember as the economist/management guy who caused a bit of a furor by claiming that the way any given language marks the future tense is a good predictor of future-oriented behaviours like saving money, taking care of health, and that sort of thing.
Some background: If you know about hyperbolic discounting it's probably a no-brainer to hear that if you give people a 401k/superannuation form with a picture of themselves now they'll put down lower payments than if you present them with a photo of themselves photoshopped to look old. The reason for this is that as a species we like to enjoy the good times now and make our future selves pay for it, but if you make people identify more with their future selves then they don't feel quite so great about putting stuff off that way.
With that out of the way, Chen's presentation can be summarised more or less as follows: Languages vary in the way they mark the future, with some languages like Hebrew forcing you to express the future explicitly whenever you're talking about future events and other languages like Chinese letting you talk about the future without using overt tense markers. For languages like German or English which have both overt (I will eat breakfast tomorrow) and covert (I am going to eat breakfast tomorrow) ways of talking about the future that can be used more or less interchangeably, the linguists who did these surveys looked at frequency of each type and and categorised the language as weak future-marking or whatever based on the most frequent forms.
The modern version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that language structure has weak priming effects on speakers. For example, in languages where the grammatical gender of "bridge" is feminine, people are more likely to describe them as "graceful" or "soaring" whereas speakers of languages that have masculine bridges are more likely to describe them as "strong" or "durable". (See Lena Boroditsky's publications page for lots more experiments of this type).
Chen used a bunch of census type data that included the language spoken at home to find that even after you control for a fairly impressive array of confounding factors, there was a strong correlation between savings behaviour and type of future marking in a language. In fact, he claimed, language type is a better predictor of savings behaviour than a bunch of other factors that economists usually consider to be pretty important, including trifling considerations like the country's economy.
Overall story: Every time you use an overt future marker you are priming yourself to think of future-you as a different person to present-you, so you're more likely to do what makes present-you happy. Or alternatively, there is a common cause for the savings behaviour and speakers' choice of how they talk about the future.
Some background: If you know about hyperbolic discounting it's probably a no-brainer to hear that if you give people a 401k/superannuation form with a picture of themselves now they'll put down lower payments than if you present them with a photo of themselves photoshopped to look old. The reason for this is that as a species we like to enjoy the good times now and make our future selves pay for it, but if you make people identify more with their future selves then they don't feel quite so great about putting stuff off that way.
With that out of the way, Chen's presentation can be summarised more or less as follows: Languages vary in the way they mark the future, with some languages like Hebrew forcing you to express the future explicitly whenever you're talking about future events and other languages like Chinese letting you talk about the future without using overt tense markers. For languages like German or English which have both overt (I will eat breakfast tomorrow) and covert (I am going to eat breakfast tomorrow) ways of talking about the future that can be used more or less interchangeably, the linguists who did these surveys looked at frequency of each type and and categorised the language as weak future-marking or whatever based on the most frequent forms.
The modern version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says that language structure has weak priming effects on speakers. For example, in languages where the grammatical gender of "bridge" is feminine, people are more likely to describe them as "graceful" or "soaring" whereas speakers of languages that have masculine bridges are more likely to describe them as "strong" or "durable". (See Lena Boroditsky's publications page for lots more experiments of this type).
Chen used a bunch of census type data that included the language spoken at home to find that even after you control for a fairly impressive array of confounding factors, there was a strong correlation between savings behaviour and type of future marking in a language. In fact, he claimed, language type is a better predictor of savings behaviour than a bunch of other factors that economists usually consider to be pretty important, including trifling considerations like the country's economy.
Overall story: Every time you use an overt future marker you are priming yourself to think of future-you as a different person to present-you, so you're more likely to do what makes present-you happy. Or alternatively, there is a common cause for the savings behaviour and speakers' choice of how they talk about the future.
