Time travel study shows my years take up more space than yours

We think about time in terms of space, as revealed in the way we talk about it ("looking ahead to our future"; "looking back at our past") and in the results from psychology experiments. For instance, people from countries that write right-to-left find it easier to associate future events with the right-hand side of space. This begs the question - how much space do we think time takes up, and is it always constant, or does it vary with how richly we represent particular episodes?

Brittany Christian and her colleagues have explored this question with a pair of fascinating studies. The first involved 60 participants (aged 18 to 32 years) marking the position of various birthdays on a 36cm horizontal line. The middle of the line was marked as "now". Some participants were asked to draw a mark to show the position of their 8th and 9th birthdays, their previous and next birthdays (relative to now), and their 58th and 59th birthdays, representing past, present and future periods of time, respectively. Other participants did the same for the equivalent birthdays of a best friend; others did it for a stranger who shared the same birth date as them.

The key result here was that participants indicating their own birthdays tended to leave a larger gap between their previous and next birthdays, as compared with participants who marked the birthdays of a best friend. In turn, those marking the birthdays of a best friend left a larger gap between previous and next birthdays than did participants who marked the birthday positions of a stranger. No contrasts emerged for gaps between birthdays in the further past or future (8th and 9th or 58th and 59th), perhaps because we represent such distant time more generically. The main result suggests that the more richly we encode past and future events in our minds, the more physical space we allocate to our mental representation of those periods.

A second study was similar but this time 63 participants (aged 18 to 32) controlled their passage backwards or forwards through time, an experience that was created using the optic flow of white dots on a computer screen. The contraction of the dots towards the centre creates the sensation of moving backwards, the expansion of dots outwards gives the feeling of travelling forwards. Using a keypad to control their motion, the participants were asked to move forward or backwards through time until they reached various birthdays up to ten years in the past or future. As in the first study, they did this either for their own birthdays, the birthdays of a friend, or a stranger.

Participants chose to travel through more space to reach birthday events in their own lives, compared with the space they travelled when journeying towards a friend's same birthdays. Participants traversed the least amount of space to reach those birthday dates in the life of a stranger. These differences were true for past events and future events, and they held across the full span of time that was investigated (i.e. a birthday up to ten years in the past or future).

Christian and her colleagues said their finding was consistent with construal level theory: "more space is allocated to events that feature self-relevant and episodically rich (i.e. more concrete) mental representations." Future research is needed to see if other factors also affect the amount of space allocated to temporal representations, such as factual knowledge or emotional salience. Would we allocate more space to time in the life of someone who we like but don't know well, or to someone we know well, but don't like?

The researchers said the "behavioural implications of these findings remains an important challenge for future". It's speculative for now, but they surmised that their results could help make sense of the planning fallacy - our tendency to underestimate how long things will take us, compared with others. The fact that we represent our own time with more space could tempt us to feel like we can get more done in a given period.

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Christian BM, Miles LK, and Macrae CN (2012). Your space or mine? Mapping self in time. PloS one, 7 (11) PMID: 23166617

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

"The end of history illusion" illusion

An intriguing study was published in Science recently with the eye-catching title "The End of History Illusion". It spawned plentiful uncritical media coverage, including the You Won't Stay The Same article in the NYT, and already the effect has its own Wikipedia entry. But does it really exist or has hype and stylish presentation generated an illusory illusion?

Jordi Quoidbach, Dan Gilbert and Timothy Wilson claimed to have shown that people of all ages underestimate how much their personalities, preferences and values will change in the future. Ideally the psychologists would have asked people to predict the amount they'd change, and then followed them up later to compare the actual change with the prediction. They didn't do that.

Instead, their favoured approach was to survey over 7,000 people aged 18 to 68 and to ask some of them - "the reporters" - to recall their personality ten years ago, using a personality questionnaire, and to ask others - "the predictors" to estimate their expected personality ten years hence. All participants also answered questions about their current personality. The key contrast was the amount of difference between recalled vs. current personality (documented by reporters) and the amount of difference between predicted and current personality (documented by the predictors). Across every decade of life, the former was much larger. People thought their personality had changed more than they thought it would change.

But there are some serious problems here. First off, there's no actual data on real change. How do we know this is a delusion of prediction? Perhaps the reporters are wrong about how much they've changed. Quoidbach's team realised this so they looked at data from a separate longitudinal study that really had followed people over time (once in 95-96 and again in 04-06), allowing examination of actual personality change.

Unfortunately, this MacArthur Foundation Survey of MidLife Development in the United States (MIDUS) used a completely different measure of personality. "Direct comparison of the data was not possible," Quoidbach et al confessed. Nonetheless, after comparing the amount of personality change in the MIDUS survey with amount of change estimated by reporters in their own study, the researchers said the change was "almost identical", and "substantially larger" than the change predicted by the predictors in their study.

But there's another serious issue with the new research, which was highlighted in a recent blog post: that is, the predictors might well have believed that their personality will change, but they didn't know which direction it will change in. Take extraversion. Perhaps they will become more shy, perhaps more gregarious? Without knowing the direction of change, the most accurate prediction is to report no change in extraversion from their current score.

Quoidbach's group hinted at this problem by acknowledging that participants may not "feel confident predicting specific changes". To overcome this, they asked over a thousand people to answer a non-specific question, estimating how much they felt they'd changed as a person, or how much they would change. It doesn't entirely deal with the direction of change issue, but again, "reporters" estimated more change than "predictors" predicted.

Yet another survey with thousands more participants asked them to recall or predict changes in their values over ten years - things like hedonism and security. Again, people reported more change in their values than they predicted. Recalled change was more modest in older participants, but again the difference in recall and prediction occurred at every decade. However, this survey has the same problems as before - the issues of memory distortion and predicting bi-directional change - and in this case they went unaddressed.

Gathering yet more data, the researchers surveyed thousands of people about their preferences in the past compared with now, and asked others about their likely preferences in the future, compared with now - things like favoured holidays, taste in music and food. The idea of this study was to eliminate memory bias. Quoidbach et al reasoned that people have an accurate sense of their past preferences, although they didn't reference any data to support this claim. People recalling the past again appeared to have changed more than was anticipated by those looking ahead.

A final, far smaller study attempted to address the practical implications of our failure to anticipate how much we will change in the future. One hundred and seventy adults were split in two groups. One stated their current favourite band and said how much they'd pay to see them in ten years. The other group reported their favourite band ten years ago and said how much they'd pay to see them today. There was a big difference - those looking ahead said they'd pay 61 per cent more to see their current favourite band, as compared with the price the retrospective group said they'd pay to see their former favourite band today. "Participants substantially overpaid for a further opportunity to indulge a current preference," the researchers said.

But was this a fair comparison? The retrospective group know things about their former favourite band that the future group couldn't possibly know about their current favourite band. For example, perhaps members of the retrospective group didn't like their chosen band's follow-up albums, perhaps they already saw them in concert many times over the last ten years. Maybe the future group were optimistic about the future creative output of their current favourite band. In short, there are so many other factors at play here, besides participants' beliefs about the stability of their own preferences.

Convinced by their own demonstrations of the End of History Illusion, Quoidbach et al speculated about the possible causes. One explanation, they suggested, is that the effect is a manifestation of our gilded view of ourselves: "most people believe that their personalities are attractive ....," the researchers wrote, "having reached that exalted state, they may be reluctant to entertain the possibility of change." But this explanation seems to ignore the self-doubt and pessimism that blights many people's lives. Quoidbach's other proposal is that the End of History Illusion is a manifestation of the fluency heuristic - because it's tricky to imagine change in the future, we infer that change is unlikely.

These speculations are premature. It would be easier to believe in the End of History of Illusion if there was data on actual change, rather than a reliance on participants' memories of themselves in the past. Even if the effect is real, it's also not clear if this is a general bias about the future that extends beyond our beliefs about ourselves. What predictions would we make about the future change of other people? Or about human culture in general? Here's one thing that surely won't change - slick psychology papers with eye-catching titles getting lots of attention.

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Quoidbach J, Gilbert DT, and Wilson TD (2013). The end of history illusion. Science (New York, N.Y.), 339 (6115), 96-8 PMID: 23288539 

[thanks Thom Baguley for help with understanding some of the methodological issues]

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Tipping is more prevalent in countries that are more corrupt

"I don't tip because society says I have to. Alright, I tip when somebody really deserves a tip. If they put forth an effort, I'll give them something extra. But I mean, this tipping automatically, that's for the birds." Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs. 

Mr Pink's approach to tipping is that it should be a reward for past good service. Another way to view tipping is as a payment to ensure superior service in the future. It's this latter, future-oriented motivation for tipping that Magnus Torfason and his colleagues say explains their curious observation.

Using data on tipping behaviour in 32 countries (collected from The International Guide to Tipping) and comparing this against the Corruption Perception Index, the researchers found that rates of corruption are higher in countries that tip more (the correlation was .6 were 1 would be a perfect match). This may strike some as odd - tipping is often seen as altruistic, whereas corruption is immoral. Yet, the researchers propose that tipping to ensure future good service is comparable to a bribe and this could explain the puzzling association.

To test these ideas further, Torfason's team focused on two countries with similar rates of tipping, but different rates of corruption - India (with high tipping and high corruption) and Canada (high tipping, low corruption). A survey of 95 Canadians and 157 Indians revealed that the Indians were more likely than Canadians to say they tipped as a way to ensure good service in the future, and this motivation was correlated with their more positive attitudes towards bribery.

In a final study, the researchers primed 40 US undergrads with either a future-oriented or past-oriented approach to tipping. For this they used two versions of text ostensibly taken from the Emily Post etiquette guide. After reading that tipping should be performed as a way to ensure good service in the future (as opposed to rewarding past good service), the students tended to view two accounts of political and legal bribery more leniently.

"The studies reported here highlight a psychological mechanism that may help explain the surprising association between tipping and bribery both within and across countries," the researchers said. They added that the findings raise some intriguing possibilities - for example, might encouraging people to give tips specifically as a reward for past good service act to reduce the tolerance of bribery in society?
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Magnus Thor Torfason, Francis J. Flynn, and Daniella Kupor (2012). Here Is a Tip: Prosocial Gratuities Are Linked to Corruption. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550612454888

-Further reading- Why we tip and how to get a bigger tip.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Prepared to wait? New research challenges the idea that we favour small rewards now over bigger later

The old idea that we make decisions like rational agents has given way over the last few decades to a more realistic, psychologically informed picture that recognises the biases and mental short-cuts that sway our thinking. Supposedly one of these is hyperbolic discounting - our tendency to place disproportionate value on immediate rewards, whilst progressively undervaluing distant rewards the further in the future they stand. But not so fast, say Daniel Read at Warwick Business School and his colleagues with a new paper that fails to find any evidence for the phenomenon.

Studies of hyperbolic discounting have often involved participants choosing between a smaller sooner reward and a later larger reward at two time points. When both rewards are in the distant future, people will pick the larger reward, but when the smaller reward is imminent then it's the one that's favoured.

Read's team criticise these kinds of studies on several counts, including the fact that participants often know that the first decision is hypothetical (thus increasing the chance they'll give the socially desirable answer), and the fact that participants often get to interact between the two decision points, which can lead to social influences.

For the new research, Read and his colleagues tested 128 participants from the LSE and Leeds Business School, sending them four weekly emails each containing several choices. The first Tuesday, the participants indicated in an email whether they'd prefer £20 immediately or £21 in one week; £21 in one week or £22 in two weeks; £22 in three weeks or £23 in four weeks; £23 in five weeks or £24 in six weeks. The following Tuesday they made the same choices, but updated for the progress of time, beginning with £21 immediately or £22 in one week, and ditto for the next two Tuesdays. The participants were told that a random selection of them would receive one of their choices, with the reward coming at the appropriate time, thus lending some reality to the task.

If hyperbolic discounting is real, there should have been evidence of the participants showing a greater preference for smaller sooner rewards the more imminent they became. No such effect was found. The researchers also looked at the ratio of choice switches - when participants favoured one option at one time point, but changed their mind later on - in terms of whether they changed to being more patient or to being more impatient. Contrary to hyperbolic discounting, switches to greater patience (favouring larger rewards later) were just as common as the other way around.

A second study built on these findings with 201 US citizens first making a choice between $20 three weeks from today vs. $21 five weeks from today; and then making the choice again three weeks later, so that the smaller reward was imminent and the slightly larger reward was two weeks hence. Some of the participants were told they were making the choice for real (and they were - the researchers even took turns sleeping so that they could fire back vouchers in timely fashion); others were told there was a chance of their choices being acted on for real.

Once again, no evidence was found for hyperbolic discounting. Just as many participants switched to greater patience at the second choice. And the smaller sooner reward was actually chosen slightly less often at the second choice, when it was immediate.

Read's team recognise that there is widespread evidence for myopic decision making - just think of the times you've vowed that your future self will eat healthy food, but when the choice is imminent you go for short-term flavour over long-term health. But they think there's a big question mark over hyperbolic discounting per se as the explanation for these effects. More promising theories, Read and his colleagues believe, are "visceral arousal theory", in which we're motivated to prioritise our primary needs over longer term aims; and "temporal construal theory", in which we represent distant events more abstractly in terms of superordinate (lofty) goals, whilst seeing the short-term more concretely, in terms of our more basic needs.

If hyperbolic discounting is such a fundamental feature of human thinking, Read and his team conclude, then how come research on regret finds that most people rue, not their overindulgence, but their past failures to indulge?

How do these debates fit with your own experiences? Do you find that you favour immediate rewards, even if you could get a bigger reward by waiting?

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Read D, Frederick S, and Airoldi M (2012). Four days later in Cincinnati: Longitudinal tests of hyperbolic discounting. Acta Psychologica, 140 (2), 177-85 PMID: 22634266

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Thinking about our hourly wage stops us from smelling the roses

Thinking about the monetary value of our time prevents us from being able to enjoy those moments when we're not working. That's the implication of new research by Sanford DeVoe and Julian House. Once we think about our time in monetary terms, they say, any time not working becomes lost revenue. This makes us impatient to get back to work and stops us from savouring the moment.

In an initial study, fifty-three students at a Canadian University answered questions about how much they expected to work and earn in their first year after graduating. Crucially, half of them answered a further question about how that would translate into an hourly wage. Next, the students were given ten minutes free time to browse the web. The key finding is that the students who hadn't thought about their hourly wage were happier after the web browsing than they were before - they'd obviously made the most of the chance to surf the internet. By contrast, the students who'd thought about their post-graduation hourly wage were no happier after the web browsing than they were before. "Their experience of this leisure period lost some of its hedonic value and failed to bring about any improvement in their happiness," the researchers said.

A second study tested if thinking about the monetary value of time has this adverse effect because it makes us impatient. This time hundreds of participants were recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk (a site for recruiting people to work on problems at their computers). The participants listened to 86 seconds of "the Flower Duet" from the opera Lakmé after answering some work-related questions, which either did or didn't involve thinking about their hourly pay. After the music, the participants who'd previously worked out their hourly rate for the past year were less happy than other participants. What's more, this difference in happiness was entirely mediated by their impatience. The participants who'd worked out their hourly rate tended to agree with statements like "I was impatient for the music to end" and to disagree with statements like "I felt the music was a relaxing break".

If thinking about the monetary value of our time prevents us from savouring the moment, what if we're compensated for that time? A final study tested this idea. Again, some participants worked out their hourly wage before listening to a short piece of music. However, this time some of them were given a small additional participation fee for the time spent listening to the music. With this payment, the participants who'd thought about their hourly wage were able to appreciate the music just as much as the other participants who hadn't thought about their hourly pay.

The researchers said these new results show how modern working practices could affect the way we choose to spend our free time and how much we're able to enjoy it. In particular, with more people in part-time, flexi-time and freelance roles, time more than ever is likely to be perceived as having a monetary value. "Thinking about time in terms of money is poised to affect our ability to smell the proverbial roses," the researchers concluded.

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DeVoe, S., and House, J. (2012). Time, money, and happiness: How does putting a price on time affect our ability to smell the roses? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48 (2), 466-474 DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.11.012

Further reading: Being paid by the hour changes the way we think about time.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Having superior working memory capacity can make time go faster

Working memory is like a neural memo-pad. People with higher working memory capacity can hold more items in mind whilst solving a concurrent problem or performing a distracting task. There's been some excitement lately about the possibility that working memory can be improved through training, with knock-on benefits for IQ and academic attainment. A new study suggests such training should come with a footnote: "Improving your working memory could affect your perception of time".

James Woehrle and Joseph Magliano divided 99 students into two groups according to whether they had high or low working memory capacity. Next, the students solved subtraction problems in their heads. They were told the maths was their primary task but an extra challenge was to solve the problems for a certain duration, as judged by their own internal sense of time: either two minutes or four minutes.

The intriguing finding is that time went faster for the students with higher working memory capacity. When tasked with doing the maths for four minutes, they tended to work for longer, estimating that the time was up later than the low working memory participants.

What was going on? Why should having more working memory speed up the passage of time? Woehrle and Magliano said the finding was consistent with a popular account of time estimation, which posits that pulses are released by an internal pacemaker and accumulate in a counter. More pulses in the counter suggests more time has passed. Crucially, this process is gated by attention. When we pay attention to time, each pulse makes it into the counter and the passage of time feels slower. By contrast, if our attention is focused elsewhere, fewer pulses make it into the counter, as if less time has passed than really has (i.e. giving the subjective feeling of time having flown).

According to Woehrle and Magliano's Working Memory Capacity Hypothesis - the students in the current study with more working memory were able to allocate their attention almost entirely on the primary maths task. This benefited their maths performance but meant they were less vigilant of pulses accumulating in their internal clock. By contrast, the low working memory students couldn't help but allocate some attention to the secondary time-keeping task, making them more aware of the passage of time. As a consequence the low working memory students' time perception was actually more accurate but their maths performance suffered. The researchers said this evidence could have "profound implications in academic situations ... low working memory students may 'think' too much about how much time they put into their school work."

The new findings complement previous research showing that greater working memory capacity is associated with more accurate time perception, when time perception is the primary task. In this case, having more working memory allows for greater vigilance of the internal pacemaker and counter. Indeed, in the current study, the time perception of the higher working memory group was superior in a control condition in which they only had to estimate the passage of time.

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Woehrle, J., and Magliano, J. (2012). Time flies faster if a person has a high working-memory capacity. Acta Psychologica, 139 (2), 314-319 DOI: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.12.006

Previously on the Digest: Doubt cast on the maxim that time goes faster as you get older.
The surprising links between anger and time perception

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.