Premium
Language Shapes People's Time Perspective and Support for Future‐Oriented Policies
Author(s) -
Pérez Efrén O.,
Tavits Margit
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
american journal of political science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.347
H-Index - 170
eISSN - 1540-5907
pISSN - 0092-5853
DOI - 10.1111/ajps.12290
Subject(s) - referent , proposition , perspective (graphical) , estonian , politics , affect (linguistics) , linguistics , psychology , political science , sociology , computer science , artificial intelligence , communication , law , philosophy
Can the way we speak affect the way we perceive time and think about politics? Languages vary by how much they require speakers to grammatically encode temporal differences. Futureless tongues (e.g., Estonian) do not oblige speakers to distinguish between the present and future tense, whereas futured tongues do (e.g., Russian). By grammatically conflating “today” and “tomorrow,” we hypothesize that speakers of futureless tongues will view the future as temporally closer to the present, causing them to discount the future less and support future‐oriented policies more. Using an original survey experiment that randomly assigned the interview language to Estonian/Russian bilinguals, we find support for this proposition and document the absence of this language effect when a policy has no obvious time referent. We then replicate and extend our principal result through a cross‐national analysis of survey data. Our results imply that language may have significant consequences for mass opinion.