Callizo-Romero, Carmen;
Tutnjević, Slavica;
Pandza, Maja;
Ouellet, Marc;
Kranjec, Alexander;
Ilić, Sladjana;
Gu, Yan;
... Santiago, Julio; + view all
(2022)
Does time extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? A multitask crosscultural study.
Language and Cognition
, 14
(2)
pp. 275-302.
10.1017/langcog.2022.5.
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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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Does time extend asymmetrically into the past and the future? A multitask crosscultural study |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1017/langcog.2022.5 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2022.5 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | cross-cultural studies, self-continuity, temporal asymmetry, temporal depth, temporal distance, time discounting, temporal focus |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10161715 |
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