How everything impacts us

I have recently found a research paper written by a Yale teacher about how our economic behavior is directly related to the language we speak. I found this incredibly intriguing since this kind of hypothesis basically means that everything around us shapes our personalities and characters in ways we can’t start to imagine.

The incentive of this research was given by how languages mark time frames. This criterion separates those languages that require future events to be grammatically marked when making predictions (strong-FTR languages, like English), from those that do not (weak-FTR languages, like German). From there, this teacher proceeded to analyze stats about the behavior of groups of people who natively speak those languages.

His conclusion: those people who natively speak weak-FTR languages are more likely to save money and to be physically active, and less likely to smoke. This happens mainly because of a certain bias induced by the way we talk about time. When a German talks about the future, he uses the present tense. Therefore, he perceives the future as being a lot closer than someone who would use a special future tense to refer to that certain time frame.

Thus, someone who speaks a weak-FTR language is be more productive because he prepares for the future like it is a lot nearer, and someone who speaks a strong-FTR language tends to “live in the present” because his understanding of time puts the future farther away.

I knew for a fact that the human brain is one hell of a plastic device – it can bend and adjust freely to lots of things - but I believe that what this research has given us is quite remarkable. The fact that the language we speak can shape our behavior to this extent is, I think, quite a good way to make us realize just how much we can be influenced by the things around us.

I wonder what happens to someone who natively speaks a strong-FTR language when he moves to a country where a weak-FTR language is spoken. Does he start to develop the same behavior as the people who live there? Or is the strong-FTR behavior deeply embedded into his brain?

A lot of questions can be asked based on this fact. But despite all the questions and uncertainties, one thing is very clear: we are not merely defined by what we do. We are also defined by what other people do around us.

Articol scris de Raluca-Ioana Vacaru (XI B)

Posted in: Think different