Future Tense and Economic Decisions: Controlling for Cultural Evolution.

ABSTRACT: A previous study by Chen demonstrates a correlation between languages that grammatically mark future events and their speakers' propensity to save, even after controlling for numerous economic and demographic factors. The implication is that languages which grammatically distinguish the present and the future may bias their speakers to distinguish them psychologically, leading to less future-oriented decision making. However, Chen's original analysis assumed languages are independent. This neglects the fact that languages are related, causing correlations to appear stronger than is warranted (Galton's problem). In this paper, we test the robustness of Chen's correlations to corrections for the geographic and historical relatedness of languages. While the question seems simple, the answer i

SUBMITTER: Roberts SG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4506144 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature