Perspective of Time, Personality, and Behavior

Often in English we speak about time in metaphorical terms of motion. Two categories are associated with how we talk metaphorically about time: the Moving Ego metaphor, in which one progresses along a timeline toward the future, and the Moving Time metaphor in which time is seen as moving from future to past, like an object moving along a conveyer belt (Lakoff, 1987).  For example, we say "We're approaching Christmas,"(Moving Ego) and "Christmas is approaching."(Moving Time) (Clark, 1973; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). The authors call the context in which people use these metaphorical terms, temporal perspective.

How one thinks and uses each of these metaphors can have an influence on their behavior. Recently published in the journal of Cognitive Science, Sarah Duffy, Michele Feist, and Steven McCarthy explore how people reason about events in time, how that relates to self reported conscientiousness and procrastination, and how those variables can have an influence on behavior. Often one can adopt different temporal perspectives in different real-life contexts. In order to test how temporal perspective can have an effect on real life behavior, the experimenters set up three groups within events to compare to each other: people's rates traveling to work -(whether they were on time, late, early) - Experiment 1 , the rate at which students turned in an essay in relation to the due date- Experiment 2, and the time of arrival for a scheduled appointment- Experiment 3. To indicate temporal reasoning, people were interviewed within the time interval within the three groups.

Experiment 1 compared the time at which workers were arriving to work with their time of arrival to a meeting. In this experiment conscientious individuals who adopted the Moving Time perspective were more likely to be early to both events. Experiment 2 explored how the time at which students turned in their assignments (closer or further from the due date) corresponds to their temporal perspective. Experiment 3 examined how timeliness in getting to an appointment corresponds to temporal perspective. For both Experiments 2 and 3, results indicated that individuals who held the Moving Ego perspective and were more conscientious had turned in their assignments earlier and were early in getting to their appointments.

While I know personally my procrastination changes with the context of the task, it's interesting to see now how my perspective of time can influence the degree to which I'm conscientious/procrastinating. How do you think about time in different contexts? And how might your personality coincide with that mindset?

Eli