LANGUAGE shapes the way you behave. Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale, not a linguist, thinks that language matters when you start to think about what people do with money. Futured language speakers, he says, tend to save less than those whose language is unfutured. English is an example of a language that is futured — it is raining, it will rain tomorrow; Mandarin and Malay are unfutured — it rains today it rains tomorrow.
Chen did a simple study: he looked at how weather forecasters spoke about the weather for the natural pattern of language in the region. Forecasters seldom speak about the past, he says, explaining his finding in a TEDblog, so that’s a natural place to look for speech about the future. So he and his researchers looked at and examined patterns of weather forecasts in countries from Azerbaijan to Lithuania through Russia to Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese. What he found, after taking into consideration all the possible variables, is that patterns in weather forecasts can predict how people save for the future.
“Essentially, a 20 percentage point increase in the frequency of future tenses results in 1 per cent less of GDP (gross domestic product) saved,” he said.
So the way you structure time, distinguishing the present from the future, can shape the way you prepare yourself for a time that is yet to come. Mandarin speakers, for instance, who speak of tomorrow as if it is today, tend to be more geared towards saving than English speakers, where tomorrow is in the future.
“Futureless language speakers are 30 per cent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers,” said Chen.
In a paper published in the American Economic Review 2013, Chen stated that even within a country where people are multilingual (Malaysia is one of the nine countries that he looked at), cross-country regressions show a strong correlation between weak-FTR (future tense reference) languages and future oriented behaviour.
“(S)peakers of weak-FTR languages (with little to no grammatical distinction between the present and future) appear more future-oriented in numerous monetary and non- monetary behaviours. Weak-FTR speakers are 31 per cent more likely to have saved in any given year, have accumulated 39 per cent more wealth by retirement, are 24 per cent less likely to smoke, are 29 per cent more likely to be physically active, and are 13 per cent less likely to be medically obese,” he wrote.
How language shapes perception has been a long and controversial area in linguistics, for example the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but when there is an encroachment from someone who is completely outside the field, then interest is rekindled.
We are all aware of how naming things or giving a proper term for a phenomenon somehow seems to decrease fear or gives us the impression as if things are under control. But language determining how we behave seem to suggest that what we speak is at the root of our psychology.
Chen explained his findings to
the BBC’s Business Daily: “The act of savings is fundamentally about understanding that your future self — the person you’re saving for — is in some sense equivalent to your present self. If your language separates the future and the present in its grammar that seems to lead you to slightly disassociate the future from the present every time you speak. That effectively makes it harder for you to save.”
Chen has been attacked by economists and linguists about the quick way he comes to conclusions based on what is actually a deeper and more subtle area than just tensed thinking. One of his critics, linguist John McWhorter of Columbia university, said that Chen had got his classifications of languages all wrong. “Russian, and languages like it, are a lot more like Mandarin than Keith Chen thinks,” he said.
Another critic, Morten Lau from Durham University’s department of behavioural economics said that how people save has little to do with language. Lau was more pragmatic: in his own work, he said, he found a greater correlation between savings and interest rates. And besides, things could get very complex. For instance, from his own research in Denmark, he found that male smokers went for higher interest rates than non smokers, but women smokers gave no puff to it at all.
Chen is adamant, though, in his thinking. Thinking and knowing about the future, it seems, is not enough to trigger you into action. It is the realisation that the future is a continuation of where you are now that matters. It should be noted here that Chen posed questions to his subjects not just on savings but also on other types of behaviours where the present affects the future, such as condom use.
“It actually seems like encouraging yourself to think in the present tense makes it a little bit easier to engage in self-control,” he told the BBC. But at the heart of this is the classification of languages into FTR and non-FTR. The BBC, for instance, has plunged into its populist headline making for Chen now, “Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire”. But is English a purely FTR language without any redeeming factors? Not so. Consider this: He reads poetry at the Town Hall tomorrow.