When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(53)
Today, thanks to the work of psychologist Constantine Sedikides of the University of Southampton and others, nostalgia has been redeemed. Sedikides calls it “a vital intrapersonal resource that contributes to psychological equanimity . . . a repository of psychological sustenance.” The benefits of thinking fondly about the past are vast because nostalgia delivers two ingredients essential to well-being: a sense of meaning and a connection to others. When we think nostalgically, we often feature ourselves as the protagonist in a momentous event (a wedding or a graduation, for instance) that involves the people we care about most deeply.7 Nostalgia, research shows, can foster positive mood, protect against anxiety and stress, and boost creativity.8 It can heighten optimism, deepen empathy, and alleviate boredom.9 Nostalgia can even increase physiological feelings of comfort and warmth. We’re more likely to feel nostalgic on chillier days. And when experimenters induce nostalgia—through music or smell, for instance—people are more tolerant of cold and perceive the temperature to be higher.10
Like poignancy, nostalgia is a “bittersweet but predominantly positive and fundamentally social emotion.” Thinking in the past tense offers “a window into the intrinsic self,” a portal to who we really are.11 It makes the present meaningful.
The same principle applies to the future. Two prominent social scientists—Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia—have argued that while “all animals are on a voyage through time,” humans have an edge. Antelope and salamanders can predict the consequences of events they’ve experienced before. But only humans can “pre-experience” the future by simulating it in our minds, what Gilbert and Wilson call “prospection.”12 However, we’re not nearly as skilled in this ability as we believe we are. While the reasons vary, the language we speak—literally the tenses we use—can play a role.
M. Keith Chen, an economist now at UCLA, was one of the first to explore the connection between language and economic behavior. He first grouped thirty-six languages into two categories—those that have a strong future tense and those that have a weak or nonexistent one. Chen, an American who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, offers the differences between English and Mandarin to illustrate the distinction. He says, “[I]f I wanted to explain to an English-speaking colleague why I can’t attend a meeting later today, I could not say ‘I go to a seminar.’” In English, Chen would have to explicitly mark the future by saying, “I will be going to a seminar” or “I have to go to a seminar.” However, Chen says, if “on the other hand I were speaking Mandarin, it would be quite natural for me to omit any marker of future time and say W? qù tīng ji?ngzò (I go listen seminar).”13 Strong-future languages such as English, Italian, and Korean require speakers to make sharp distinctions between the present and the future. Weak-future languages such as Mandarin, Finnish, and Estonian draw little or often no contrast at all.
Chen then examined—controlling for income, education, age, and other factors—whether people speaking strong-future and weak-future languages behaved differently. They do—in somewhat stunning fashion. Chen found that speakers of weak-future languages—those that did not mark explicit differences between present and future—were 30 percent more likely to save for retirement and 24 percent less likely to smoke. They also practiced safer sex, exercised more regularly, and were both healthier and wealthier in retirement. This was true even within countries such as Switzerland, where some citizens spoke a weak-future language (German) and others a strong-future one (French).14
Chen didn’t conclude that the language a person speaks caused this behavior. It could merely reflect deeper differences. And the question of whether language actually shapes thought and therefore action remains a contentious issue in the field of linguistics.15 Nonetheless, other research has shown we plan more effectively and behave more responsibly when the future feels more closely connected to the current moment and our current selves. For example, one reason some people don’t save for retirement is that they somehow consider the future version of themselves a different person than the current version. But showing people age-advanced images of their own photographs can boost their propensity to save.16 Other research has found that simply thinking of the future in smaller time units—days, not years—“made people feel closer to their future self and less likely to feel that their current and future selves were not really the same person.”17 As with nostalgia, the highest function of the future is to enhance the significance of the present.
Which leads to the present itself. Two final studies are illuminating. In the first, five Harvard researchers asked people to make small “time capsules” of the present moment (three songs they recently listened to, an inside joke, the last social event they attended, a recent photo, etc.) or write about a recent conversation. Then they asked people to guess how curious they’d be to see what they documented several months later. When the time came to view the time capsules, people were far more curious than they had predicted. They also found the contents of what they’d memorialized far more meaningful than they had expected. Across multiple experiments, people underestimated the value of rediscovering current experiences in the future.
“By recording ordinary moments today, one can make the present a ‘present’ for the future,” the researchers write.18