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Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money? Ozgun Atasoy takes a look at the research Keith Chen presents in his TED Talk on how language correlates with your ability to save money. [Scientific American] Read more about Chen’s research »

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Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money?

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

1. Navigation and Pormpuraawans
   In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.
   .
2. Blame and English Speakers
   In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.
   .
3. Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
   Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.
   .
4. Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
   In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

How are China, Estonia and Germany different from India, Greece and the UK? To an economist, one answer is obvious: savings rates. Germans save 10 percentage points more than the British do (as a fraction of GDP), while Estonians and Chinese save a whopping 20 percentage points more than Greeks and Indians. Economists think a lot about what drives people to save, but many of these international differences remain unexplained. In a recent paper of mine, I find that these countries differ not only in how much their residents save for the future, but also how their native speakers talk about the future.

Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money?

In late 2011, an idea struck me while reading several papers in psychology that link a person’s language with differences in how they think about space, color, and movement. As a behavioral economist, I am interested in understanding how people make decisions. Could a person’s language subtly affect his or her everyday decisions? In particular, could the way a person’s language marks the future affect their propensity to save for the future?

In a nutshell, this is precisely what I found. After scouring many datasets with millions of records on individual household savings behavior—along with a number of peculiar health performance metrics like grip strength and walking speed—I find that languages that oblige speakers to grammatically separate the future from the present lead them to invest less in the future. Speakers of such languages save less, retire with less wealth, smoke more, practice more unsafe sex and are more obese. Surprisingly, this effect persists even after controlling for a speaker’s education, income, family structure and religion.

Back when my first paper on this topic circulated, many linguists were appropriately skeptical of the work. Their concerns are concisely explained in two well-thought out posts (here and here) by the linguists Mark Liberman and Goeffrey Pullum on the blog they founded, Language Log. Mark and Geoffrey also invited me to write a guest post explaining the work. In that post, I discuss which of their possible concerns are unlikely given the patterns I find across the world in people’s savings and health behaviors, and also try to clarify which of their concerns I was not yet able to address.

This exchange prompted a broad set of discussions as to what different types of data, analyses and experiments could, in principle, answer the questions raised by the patterns I find. Cross-disciplinary discussions took place in a subsequent post by Julie Sedivy and followup posts by Mark Liberman, and also at the Linguistic Data Consortium’s 20th Anniversary Workshop. Several new avenues of investigation and work came out of these interactions, three of which are now ongoing projects.

One new idea that I’ve begun to explore entails measuring a language’s time reference by scraping the web—to search for natural patterns in language—in addition to using linguistic classifications. This led me to search the web for the simplest form of writing about the future I could find: weather forecasts. Why weather forecasts? Well, forecasts rarely talk about the past, so they’re a natural place to look for speech about the future. Weather forecasters also generally communicate in natural, straightforward language, and often convey similar content across different settings. Can patterns in weather forecasts measure how languages structure the future, and can these differences predict how people save for the future? Amazingly, they do.

A team of linguistics and economics students assisted with this analysis, and managed to scrape the web for weather forecasts in 39 languages from around the world. The figure below summarizes what we found: wide variation in how often, when talking about future weather, forecasts in a particular language grammatically mark the future as something distinct from the present. In English, for example, this comes down to the relative frequency of sentences like:

Rain is likely this weekend.                (present tense “is”)

It will likely rain this weekend.          (future tense “will rain”)

What’s surprising is that when I repeat the statistical analysis I did in the paper, I find an incredibly strong relationship between how forecasters talk about weather and how much people choose to save. Essentially, a 20 percentage point increase in the frequency of future tenses results in 1% less of GDP saved. This finding holds even after taking into account a country’s level of development, rate of growth, demographics, social security protections and major religions.

What does this mean? I don’t believe it demonstrates extreme weather forecaster persuasion. Rather, I think it shows that many different ways of measuring how languages mark time share a strong and striking relationship with how speakers of those languages save. In short, I believe more than ever that the data suggests a strong and robust relationship between linguistic and economic data, a relationship that leaves us at an exciting crossroads: one where economists have a tremendous amount to learn from linguists.

The figure below measures the percent of time weather forecasts use future vs. present tenses (download a larger version as a PDF). See the paper here for details.