Culture,Temporal Focus,and Values of the Past and the Future

Abstract

This article examines cultural differences in how people value future and past events. Throughout four studies, the authors found that European Canadians attached more monetary value to an event in the future than to an identical event in the past, whereas Chinese and Chinese Canadians placed more monetary value to a past event than to an identical future event. The authors also showed that temporal focus—thinking about the past or future—explained cultural influences on the temporal value asymmetry effect. Specifically, when induced to think about and focus on the future, Chinese valued the future more than the past, just like Euro-Canadians; when induced to think about and focus on the past, Euro-Canadians valued the past more than the future, just like Chinese.

Keywords

culture temporal values temporal focus past and future

Study the past if you would divine the future.

Confucius

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke

Would you be willing to pay more money or less for the same product or service after receiving it than before receiving it? Alternatively, would you require more compensation for an event that happened in the past or for an identical event happening in the future? If your response to either question differs for the two periods, past and future, then you are exhibiting an asymmetry in temporal value. This article examines how temporal value asymmetry may take on different forms in different cultures.

Temporal Value Asymmetry Effect

A temporal value asymmetry effect has been found by Caruso, Gilbert, and Wilson (2008), who demonstrated that people tended to attach more value to an event in the future than to one that happened in the past, despite the fact that the past and future events were equally distant from the present. For example, in one study, participants imagined spending 5 hours entering data a month before (past condition) or a month later (future condition). For the same job, participants in the future condition believed that they should receive US$ 125.04, much more than the US$ 62.20 required by those in the past condition. Valuing events in the future more than identical events in the equidistant past has significant practical implications. More specifically, “establishing the value of an event before it happens will be advantageous to people who profit by it and disadvantageous to those who pay for it” (Caruso et al., 2008, p. 800).

Three potential factors may help to explain this temporal value asymmetry effect. First, Van Boven and Ashworth (2007) found that the emotional responses evoked by anticipating future events were more extreme than those evoked by reflecting on identical past events. Second, Van Boven and Ashworth reported that this is associated with a tendency to expect future emotions to be more intense than emotions remembered associated with a past event. Caruso et al. (2008) obtained similar findings. The third factor that may account for the temporal value asymmetry effect is asymmetric mental simulation. People tend to engage in more extensive mental simulation in anticipation of future events than in retrospection about similar ones in the past (Van Boven & Ashworth, 2007). The valuation of an object and event can be directly affected by the mental simulation processes.

However, the temporal value asymmetry effect has been demonstrated with North American participants only. Given the practical and theoretical implications of the effect, it would be interesting to examine whether such an effect would be found with people from other cultural backgrounds. By drawing on the literature on temporal orientation or temporal focus, we suggest that the temporal value asymmetry effect could be reversed with Chinese participants. Temporal orientation is defined as cognitive involvement in the past, present, or future (e.g., Holman & Silver, 1998; Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999), and the tendency to experience emotional and behavioral reactions to these temporal regions (Jones, Banicky, Lasane, & Pomare, 1996; Strathman & Joireman, 2005). The existing literature (with one exception, Shipp, Edwards, & Lambert, 2009) has used temporal orientation to describe individuals as having one predominant orientation toward past, present, or future, without allowing for orientation toward more than one time period (see Shipp et al., 2009, for a summary).¹

European North American Culture: More Future Than Past Oriented

In general, North Americans are believed to have a strong future orientation and a weak past orientation (Graham, 1981; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; Spears, Lin, & Mowen, 2001). For example, as Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck (p. 15) pointed out, Americans expect the future to be “bigger and better” than the past. North Americans’ strong future orientation and weak past orientation may be rooted in their linear notion of time, according to which the past leads to the present and on to the future. Because the future is always approaching and the past is inevitably receding, the future is viewed as much more important (Graham, 1981; Spears et al., 2001). Empirical research has supported the suggestions that North Americans tend to be more future oriented than past oriented using a number of different paradigms.

Subjective temporal distance

Focusing on the future, or having a future orientation, should make the future more accessible in people’s minds and therefore should make it feel subjectively closer to the present. When asked to indicate the subjective temporal distance of future and past points in time equidistant from the present, such as 1 week from now and 1 week ago, American participants reported that the future time felt closer to the present than the past time (see Caruso, 2007), suggesting that North Americans attend to the future more than the past.

Temporal affect magnitude

Van Boven and Ashworth (2007) studied North Americans’ online affective responses when contemplating future and past events (i.e., how they felt when anticipating future events vs. recalling identical past events with similar temporal distances from the present). They found that the online emotional responses evoked by anticipating future events were more extreme than those evoked by reflecting on identical past events, indicating that they focused more on the future events than on the past ones. In addition, they also investigated the predicted and recalled emotions associated with the future and past events. For example, they investigated how happy people predicted they would be on a holiday that would take place in the future and how happy they remembered they were on the same holiday when it had occurred in the past. They found that the predicted emotions associated with the future events were more extreme than the recalled emotions associated with the identical past events. Caruso et al. (2008) obtained similar findings with a different scenario: Those who anticipated the future winter break expected it to be more enjoyable than those who recalled the same winter break after it had happened.

Cognitive clarity

Van Boven and Ashworth (2007) investigated the effects of time on clarity of mental simulations. In one study, they exposed North American participants to annoying noises and asked participants to mentally simulate listening to the noises either 20 minutes before or 20 minutes after actually listening to the noises. Participants then indicated how clear their mental simulation was, such as to what extent they could hear the noises in their head at that moment. Participants reported that they had engaged in more extensive mental simulations when anticipating the future noises than when thinking retrospectively of the past noises, indicating that North Americans tend to focus their attention more on future events than on past events. All these findings indicate that North Americans are much more future oriented than past oriented.

Chinese Culture: Primarily Past Oriented

Chinese people are believed to be primarily past oriented (Brislin & Kim, 2003; Doob, 1971; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; Ko & Gentry, 1991; Pitta, Fung, & Isberg, 1999; Spears et al., 2001; Yau, 1988), even though they also show the tendency to be future oriented (Brislin & Kim, 2003). For example, Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck wrote,

Historical China was a society which gave first-order preference to the past time orientation. Ancestor worship and a strong family tradition were both expressions of this preference. (p. 14)

Part of the reason that Chinese have a strong past orientation may be related to their cyclical notion of time. According to this view, events repeat themselves over time (Biao, 2001). As a result, the problems and difficulties that people face at the present or will face in the future can be solved or prepared for by focusing on the past and following established practices and traditions.

Cross-cultural psychological research has provided empirical evidence using a number of different paradigms showing that Chinese people have a stronger past orientation than North Americans. For instance, if a product or brand was satisfactory in the past, Chinese are less likely to switch to other products or brands than Americans (Robinson, 1996). Researchers believe that the strong brand loyalty of Chinese people is due to their strong past orientation (Brislin & Kim, 2003; Yau, 1988).

Subjective temporal distance

If an individual thinks a lot about the past, then the past should be more accessible and feel closer to the present. Ji, Guo, Zhang, and Messervey (2009) found that Chinese perceived past events to be closer to the present than did European Canadians. For example, in one study, Canadian and Chinese university students reported how far away they felt a past exam was. Although the actual temporal distance of the exams was greater for Chinese than for Canadians, Chinese perceived the past exams as being closer to the present than did Canadians. These results suggest that Chinese have a stronger past orientation than Canadians.

Temporal attention

Ji et al. (2009) found that Chinese attended to a greater range of temporal information in the past than did Canadians. In their studies, European Canadian and Chinese participants read a description of a theft case with a list of clues that occurred in the remote past, recent past, or present. They found that compared with European Canadians, Chinese participants rated behaviors that took place in the remote and recent past as being more relevant to the case, whereas the cultures did not differ for the behaviors happening at present. In a subsequent free recall task, Chinese participants were more accurate with the past clues than were European Canadians.

Temporal value estimate

A study by Levinson and Peng (2007) also supports the notion that Chinese people are more past oriented than Americans. In their study, participants from China and the United States estimated the present value of some objects when the past value was given, such as an antique chair valued at US$ 350 in 1985. They found that Chinese participants’ value estimation ratio (the ratio of estimated current value to the given value in the past) was much greater than that of Americans. In the instance of the antique chair, for example, Chinese estimations were 12.02 times the 1985 value whereas American estimations were only 2.83 times the 1985 value. The effect existed even after controlling for the inflation rates across cultures. This finding indicates that Chinese people perceive objects in the past as being much more valuable now than their American counterparts do.

Thus, the general consensus for within-cultural comparisons is that North Americans are more future oriented than past oriented (Graham, 1981; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; Spears et al., 2001; Specter & Ferrari, 2000), whereas Chinese people are primarily past oriented (Ji et al., 2009; Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck, 1961; Spears et al., 2001). As a result, unlike North Americans, Chinese may think and focus more on past events than similar future ones.

Present Research

Although perceptions of past events have been compared between Chinese and North Americans (e.g., Ji et al., 2009), to our knowledge, no cross-cultural research has examined the relationship between evaluations of past and future events within the same culture context. The first aim of the present research was to examine temporal value asymmetry among North Americans and Chinese. Because Chinese are primarily past oriented, they may attach more value to past events than future ones. As a result, the typical temporal value asymmetry effect found with North American participants may be reversed for Chinese (Hypothesis 1).

The second aim of the present research was to examine one potential mechanism for such cultural differences, namely, how much people think about and focus on the past or future. If temporal value asymmetry effect is in part caused by how much people focus on and think about the future and past, then experimentally inducing people to think about the future or past may produce or reverse the effect. Specifically, inducing European North Americans to focus on the past may lead them to value the past more than the future, reversing the typical temporal value asymmetry effect among them. Likewise, inducing Chinese to focus on the future may lead them to value the future more than the past, eliminating cultural differences that we would observe otherwise (Hypothesis 2). We conducted four studies to test these hypotheses by comparing Euro-Canadians with Chinese or Chinese Canadians.

Study 1a: Vacation

In Study 1a, participants read a scenario adapted from Caruso et al. (2008). In particular, Canadian and Chinese participants imagined that they either had received a favor from an acquaintance in the past or that they would receive the same favor in the future, and subsequently reported the amount of money they planned to spend on a gift for the acquaintance. We predicted that Canadians would spend more money on the gift for the future favor than for the past one, whereas Chinese would spend more money for the past favor than for the future one.

Method

Participants

A total of 99 European Canadian undergraduate students (25 men, 67 women, and 7 did not report their gender) from Queen’s University, Canada; 88 Chinese undergraduate students (50 men, 34 women, and 4 did not report their gender) from Beijing University, China; and 30 Chinese students (22 men and 8 women) from University of Macau, China, participated in the study. Canadian participants (M = 20.29, SD = 3.68) were slightly older than Chinese participants (M = 19.30, SD = 1.25), F(1, 203) = 7.18, p = .01. Participants received either small gifts or course credits for their participation.

Procedure

The vacation scenario was adapted from Caruso et al. (2008, Study 2b). Specifically, the Canadian participants imagined that while they were talking with a friend about their plan to take a week-long vacation in Vancouver, John, an acquaintance of the participants, mentioned that he had a well-furnished apartment in Vancouver in which the participants were more than welcome to stay. Participants were told that they accepted this generous offer.

Then participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions: past and future. Participants in the past condition imagined that they had just returned home from the week-long vacation in Vancouver, whereas participants in the future condition imagined that they were leaving for their vacation and would come back home in one week.

After reading the description of the situation, participants were told that to show their appreciation for John’s generosity, they had decided to buy John a gift that would be delivered to him in 10 days, at which time the vacation would be over in either condition. The participants imagined they went to a store to order the gift and indicated how much they planned to spend in Canadian dollars.²

The questionnaire was first created in English. It was then translated into Chinese by two bilingual research assistants, and the translation was double checked by the first two authors, who were also bilinguals, to ensure the equivalence of translation. Commonly used in professional translations, this method, according to Heine (2008), can ensure that the translation is accurate and sounds natural. During the translation, Canadian dollars were translated to Chinese yuan for Chinese participants at Beijing University and Macanese patacas, the local currency in Macau, for Chinese participants at University of Macau, and the names of the acquaintance (John) and the city (Vancouver) were replaced with a Chinese name (Ming Li) and city (Shanghai). This procedure was followed in all the studies reported here except Study 2, where only English was used in testing.

Results and Discussion

The dependent variable was the amount of money participants planned to spend on the gift. Because the monetary value question was open ended, values that were more than 3 standard deviations away from the mean were defined as extreme outliers and were subsequently excluded from the following analysis. As a result, one Canadian participant and two Chinese participants were excluded from the analysis. Another Chinese participant was excluded due to missing data. Consequently, data from 98 Canadians and 115 Chinese were included in the final analysis. We converted the amount of money Chinese participants reported into Canadian dollars by dividing it by the exchange rates (the exchange rate between Chinese yuan and Canadian dollars was 6.70 and the exchange rate between Macanese patacas and Canadian dollars was 7.84 when the data were collected).³

Gender and age did not have any significant effects and therefore will not be discussed further. The Chinese participants from Beijing University did not differ from Chinese students from University of Macau in any of the following analyses and therefore data from these two groups were combined.

We predicted that Canadian participants would spend more money on the gift in the future condition than in the past condition, whereas Chinese participants would spend more money in the past condition than in the future condition. Figure 1 shows the results for both Canadian and Chinese participants. A 2 (culture: Canadians vs. Chinese) × 2 (time: past vs. future) ANOVA was conducted with the amount of money in Canadian dollars participants planned to spend on the gift as the dependent variable. The main effect of culture was significant, F(1, 209) = 46.18, p < .001, partial η² = .18, but not the main effect of time, F(1, 209) = 0.82, p = .37. More interestingly, as hypothesized, the culture by time interaction was significant, F(1, 209) = 9.65, p < .01, partial η² = .04. Canadians planned to spend significantly more money on the gift in the future condition (M = 107.76, SD = 71.12) than in the past condition (M = 82.11, SD = 47.11), F(1, 96) = 4.43, p = .04, η² = .04, indicating that the future favor was perceived by Canadians as being more valuable than the similar past favor. In contrast, Chinese planned to spend more money on the gift in the past condition (M = 58.53, SD = 35.41) than in the future condition (M = 44.48, SD = 24.01), F(1, 113) = 6.42, p = .01, η² = .05, suggesting that they perceived the past favor as being more valuable than a similar future favor. Thus, Study 1a provided support for our prediction that European Canadians attached more value to a future event than to a similar past one, whereas Chinese placed more value on a past event than on a similar future one.⁴

Figure 1.

The amount of money European Canadians and Chinese were willing to spend for a past favor and for a future favor (Study 1a)

Study 1b: Job

Alternative explanations might exist for the results found in Study 1a. For example, the favor might be construed differently depending on when it happened. In addition, gift giving might have different meanings among Chinese than among Canadians. In Study 1b, we aimed to replicate Study 1a with a different scenario that did not involve gift giving. Following the same procedure as Caruso et al. (2008), we described simple events in detail to leave little room for different construals of the event and measured how people construed the events in the past and in the future to further rule out the alternative explanation that the past and the future events might be construed differently by Chinese and by Canadians.

Method

Participants

The Euro-Canadian participants (n = 99) and Chinese participants from Beijing University (n = 88) in Study 1a participated in Study 1b. Canadian participants (M = 20.29, SD = 3.68) were slightly older than Chinese participants (M = 19.49, SD = 1.31), F(1, 177) = 3.40, p = .07.

Procedure

We used a job scenario adapted from Caruso et al. (2008, Study 1). Specifically, Canadian and Chinese participants imagined that they had agreed to work on a 5-hour data entry job to earn extra money. After reading the scenario, participants indicated how much they thought they should be paid for the 5 hours of work.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of the two conditions: past and future. Participants in the past condition imagined that they had worked on a Saturday one month ago, whereas participants in the future condition imagined that they would work on a Saturday one month in the future. We used two items from Caruso et al. to measure how participants construed the job. Specifically, participants reported how difficult they thought the job would be on a scale ranging from 0 (not difficult at all) to 6 (extremely difficult) and how qualified they thought they were for the job on a scale ranging from 0 (not qualified at all) to 6 (extremely qualified).

Results and Discussion

Difficulty of the job and personal qualification

To determine if participants construed the job differently across cultures, we first conducted a 2 (culture) × 2 (time: past vs. future) ANOVA with the perceived difficulty of the job as the dependent variable. The culture main effect and the time main effect were not significant, Fs < 0.43, ps > .51, nor was the interaction between culture and time, F(1, 183) = .67, p = .41. To further rule out the possibility of cultural differences in job construal, a 2 (culture) × 2 (time: past vs. future) ANOVA was conducted with the perceived personal qualification for the job as the dependent variable. Again, the culture main effect and the time main effect were not significant, Fs < 1.41, ps > .23, nor was the interaction between culture and time, F(1, 183) = .25, p = .62. Thus, the job was construed similarly across cultures and across time conditions.

Temporal value asymmetry

Using the same approach as in Study 1a, extreme outliers were identified and excluded. As a result, one European Canadian participant and three Chinese participants were excluded from analysis. Two other Chinese participants were excluded due to missing data in the main dependent variable. Consequently, 98 Canadians and 83 Chinese were included in the final analysis. Next, we converted the Chinese yuan into Canadian dollars as in Study 1a. As in Study 1a, gender and age did not have any significant effects and therefore will not be discussed further.

A 2 (culture) × 2 (time: past vs. future) ANOVA with the amount of money participants thought they should receive as the dependent variable was conducted. The culture main effect was significant, F(1, 177) = 83.19, p < .001, η² = .32, and the time main effect was marginally significant, F(1, 177) = 3.28, p = .07. More importantly, as predicted, the interaction between culture and time was significant, F(1, 177) = 10.48, p = .001, partial η² = .06 (see Figure 2). The simple effect analysis showed that Canadians thought they should receive more money for doing the job in the future (M = 47.29, SD = 7.15) than for having done it in the past (M = 44.26, SD = 6.90), F(1, 96) = 4.55, p = .04, partial η² = .05, whereas Chinese thought they should receive more money for having done the job in the past (M = 31.78, SD = 26.70) than for doing it in the future (M = 21.07, SD = 12.83), F(1, 81) = 6.06, p = .02, partial η² = .07.

Figure 2.

The amount of payment requested by European Canadians and Chinese for doing a past job and a future job (Study 1b)

The results of Study 1b supported our prediction. Specifically, Canadians showed a typical temporal value asymmetry effect, as reported in Caruso et al. (2008): They asked for more payment when they would do the job in the future than when they had done the same job in the past, indicating that the future job was perceived as being more valuable than the similar past job. In contrast, Chinese showed a reversed temporal value asymmetry effect: They asked for more money when they had done the job in the past than when they would do the same job in the future, indicating that they attached more value to the job in the past than to a similar job in the future. Furthermore, in Study 1b, the possibility of construing the past and future jobs differently across cultures was reduced by defining the jobs in detail. Indeed, based on the manipulation checks, people from different cultures and in different time conditions actually construed the job similarly. Thus, the observed cultural differences in the temporal value asymmetry were not caused by different construals of the job in different cultures and time conditions.

Study 2: Reading Week Break

In Studies 1a and 1b, we found that for hypothetical scenarios, Canadians attached more value to a future event than to an identical event in the past, whereas Chinese attached more value to past than to future events. In Study 2, to demonstrate the external validity of the research, we investigated people’s real-world expectations and experiences by using an actual event—Reading Week Break (similar to Spring Break in the United States). Participants answered questions about the break at two different times: 2 weeks before and 2 weeks after it.

In contrast to Studies 1a and 1b, Study 2 employed a within-subject design with European and Chinese Canadian students. We predicted that European Canadians would be willing to pay more money for extending their future reading week than for extending their past reading week, whereas Chinese Canadians would be willing to pay more for extending their past reading week than for extending their future reading week.

Method

Participants

Email invitations were sent to the introductory psychology class at Queen’s University for an online study. Ninety-eight European Canadian undergraduate students (19 men and 79 women) and 41 Chinese Canadian undergraduate students (16 men and 25 women) volunteered to participate in the study. One European Canadian participant and two Chinese Canadian participants were excluded from further data analyses because they indicated that they just wanted to look at the questionnaire. Among the remaining 39 Chinese Canadian undergraduate students, 13 were born in Canada and the other 26 had lived in Canada for at least 2 years and 5 months (average time in Canada was 10 years). The European Canadian participants (M = 18.64 years, SD = 1.30) and the Chinese Canadian participants did not differ in age (M = 18.64 years, SD = 1.18). Participants received course credit or were entered into a lottery for their participation. The study was conducted in English.⁵

Procedure

We created online questionnaires for this study. To reduce the possibility of duplicate participations, a valid university email address was required for each participant (each student had only one university email address). To ensure that the responses could not be traced back to any individual participant, the email address was deleted from the database after it was used for matching up responses before and after the Reading Week Break and for awarding compensation for participation. To ensure that participants were engaged by the study materials, they indicated if they were interested in seriously participating in the study or just wanted to look at the questionnaires. Participants were asked to concentrate on the study and turn off any background stimuli, such as music and videos.

The online questionnaires had two versions: future and past. Participants received the future version of the questionnaire 2 weeks before the beginning of reading week and the past version of the questionnaire 2 weeks after the end of reading week. In the future (past) version, participants were first informed that reading week was about 2 weeks away (ago) from now. Participants then wrote down what they would do (had done), where they would go (had gone), and whom they would meet (had met) during reading week.

To measure the value participants attached to reading week, they indicated how much they were willing to pay to extend their reading week by 3 days, assuming that they could extend their reading week without missing any other obligations (see Caruso et al., 2008).

Results and Discussion

Temporal value asymmetry of reading week

We predicted that European Canadians would be willing to pay more money for extending their future reading week than for extending their past reading week, whereas Chinese Canadians would be willing to pay more for extending their past reading week than for extending their future reading week. Again, extreme outliers were identified by the same procedure as in Study 1a. As a result, four European Canadians and one Chinese Canadian was not included in the final analysis. One Chinese did not report the monetary value in the future condition. Thus, 93 European Canadians and 37 Chinese Canadians were included in the analysis.⁶ Figure 3 shows the results for both groups. A 2 (culture) × 2 (time: future vs. past) mixed-model ANOVA was conducted with the monetary value people were willing to pay as the dependent variable. Neither of the main effects of time and culture was significant, ps > .24. However, the culture by time interaction was significant, F(1, 128) = 8.76, p < .01, partial η² = .06. As expected, European Canadians were willing to pay slightly more for extending their future reading week (M = 72.10, SD = 73.64) than for extending their past reading week (M = 61.20, SD = 57.91), F(1, 92) = 3.10, p = .08, η² = .03, suggesting that the future reading week was perceived as being more valuable to European Canadians than the past reading week. Chinese Canadians, however, were willing to pay more money for extending their past reading week (M = 78.37, SD = 94.62) than for extending their future reading week (M = 53.26, SD = 51.75), F(1, 36) = 4.84, p = .03, η² = .12, indicating that the past reading week was perceived by Chinese Canadians as being more valuable than the future reading week.

Figure 3.

The amount of money European Canadians and Chinese Canadians were willing to pay for extending the past reading week and the future reading week (Study 2)

Study 3: Inducing Temporal Focus

In Studies 1a, 1b, and 2, we found that Euro-Canadians attached more value to future events than to identical past events, whereas Chinese and Chinese Canadians attached more value to past events than to identical future events. In Study 3, we examined the possible underlining mechanism for such cultural differences.

We argue that the more extensively people think about the future objects and events than the past ones, the more value they attach to the future ones than to the past ones. Past research has supported the notion that Chinese primarily focus on the past whereas North Americans tend to focus more on the future than the past. We believe that the differential temporal focuses between the two cultures may account for the cultural differences in valuing the past and the future events. To test this, we manipulated Canadian and Chinese participants’ temporal focus in Study 3 by inducing them to think about either their past or their future. We hypothesized that people would attach more value to a past event than to an identical future one when they were made to focus on the past. Similarly, people would attach more value to a future event than to an identical past one when they were made to focus on the future. These would be true for both Canadians and Chinese.

Method

Participants

One hundred eighty-five European Canadian students (41 men and 144 women) from Queen’s University, Canada, and 194 Chinese students (87 men, 106 women, and one student did not report gender) from University of Macau, China, participated in the study. Canadian participants (M = 18.19 years old, SD = 0.72) were slightly younger than Chinese participants (M = 19.01 years old, SD = 1.78). Participants received either course credit or were entered into a lottery for their participation.

Procedure

Participants were randomly assigned into one of the two temporal focus conditions: past focus and future focus. Participants were induced to focus their thoughts either on the past or on the future. Specifically, participants were informed that people often think about their own past (future) and were asked to spend 2 to 3 min thinking about things they had done in the past year (or things they would do in the next year). Then they were asked to briefly write down four things they had just thought about.

After completing the temporal focus task, participants were randomly assigned to one of the two vacation conditions: past and future vacations. Participants read the same scenario as in Study 1a and reported the amount of money they would spend on the gift for receiving the generous offer either in the past or in the future. Canadian participants reported the monetary value in Canadian dollars and Chinese participants in Macau reported the amount of money in Macanese patacas.

Canadian participants completed the study online. Among the Canadian participants, 23 of them completed the online questionnaire on computers in a lab. The other 162 Canadian participants received an invitation in email with a link to the online questionnaire and they completed the study on their own computers. As in Study 2, to reduce the possibility of duplicate participation, a valid university email address was required for the Canadian students who completed the study on their own computers. Given that most of the participants in the lab can complete the study within 20 min, data from eight Canadian participants who spent more than one hour to complete the study on their own computers were removed from further analysis.⁷ Canadian participants who completed the study in the lab and those who completed the study on their own computers did not differ in their responses (ps > .20). All Chinese participants completed the study in a lab.

Results and Discussion

As in Study 1a, extreme outliers were identified and excluded. As a result, five European Canadian participants and five Chinese participants were excluded from analysis. One other Canadian participant was excluded due to missing data in the main dependent variable. Consequently, 171 Canadians and 189 Chinese were included in the final analysis. Next, as in Study 1a, we converted the Macanese patacas into Canadian dollars by dividing it by 7.84 (the exchange rate when the data were collected).

Gender had a main effect on the amount of money participants planned to spend on the gift. Men (M = 91.77, SD = 80.74) planned to spend more money on the gift than women (M = 84.04, SD = 60.67), F(1, 342) = 4.50, p = .04, partial η² = .01. Other than this, gender and age did not have any other significant effects, and therefore will not be discussed further.

We predicted that when made to focus on the past, both Canadian and Chinese participants would attach more value to past events than to similar future ones. In contrast, when made to focus on the future, they would attach more value to future events than past ones. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a 2 (culture: Chinese vs. Canadian) × 2 (temporal focus: past focus vs. future focus) × 2 (vacation condition: past vs. future) ANOVA with the amount of money participants would spend as the dependent variable. The main effect of culture was significant, F(1, 352) = 12.79, p < .001, partial η² = .04. Overall, Canadian participants (M = 100.12, SD = 70.11) planned to spend more money on the gift than did their Chinese counterparts (M = 74.44, SD = 63.90). Neither temporal focus nor vacation condition had a significant main effect, Fs < 1.50, ps > .22. The interaction between culture and temporal focus was significant, F(1, 352) = 4.26, p = .04, partial η² = .01.⁸ Most importantly, the interaction between temporal focus and time condition was significant, F(1, 352) = 17.57, p < .001, partial η² = .05. As expected, participants in the past focus condition planned to spend more money on the gift for a past favor (M = 109.76, SD = 94.80) than for a future favor (M = 78.34, SD = 46.14), F(1, 164) = 7.77, p = .01, η² = .05. In contrast, participants in the future focus condition planned to spend less money on the gift for a past favor (M = 69.97, SD = 44.72) than for a future favor (M = 92.99, SD = 74.53), F(1, 192) = 6.77, p = .01, η² = .04. The three-way interaction among culture, temporal focus, and time condition was not significant, F < 1, p = .84, indicating that the temporal focus effect on temporal value asymmetry was similar for Canadian and Chinese participants. As shown in Figure 4, priming participants to think about the past or future had a similar effect among Chinese and Canadians. Overall, the results indicate that temporal focus accounted for the cultural differences in valuing past and future events.

Figure 4.

The amount of money European Canadians and Chinese were willing to spend for a past favor and for a future favor when being induced to focus on the past or future (Study 3)

General Discussion

This series of studies was conducted to examine temporal value asymmetry within Canadian and Chinese cultures and to investigate the underlying mechanism. The studies provided converging evidence that European Canadians tend to attach more value to future events than to past events, whereas Chinese and Chinese Canadians tend to attach more value to past events than to similar future events. This pattern was true for a variety of scenarios and events such as purchasing a gift to show appreciation (Study 1a) and receiving payment for doing a job (Study 1b), as well as for real-life events such as the Reading Week Break (Study 2). Furthermore, the cultural effects existed not only for scenarios in which people received money (Studies 1b and 2) but also for scenarios in which people gave away money (Study 1a), suggesting that the cultural effects on the temporal value asymmetry were not affected by the perspective (gaining or losing money) taken by people. More importantly, we also found supporting evidence that temporal focus caused cultural differences in the temporal value asymmetry effect.

The finding that European Canadians attach more value to future events than to similar ones in the past whereas Chinese place more value on past events than on similar future ones has significant theoretical implications. According to the prospect theory of valuation proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979), each additional unit increase in the magnitude of a future event has less impact on the valuation of that event than a previous increase (e.g., a change of personal wealth from 1 million dollars to 2 million dollars is less impactful than a change of wealth from $0 to 1 million dollars). Furthermore, losses have a bigger impact on value than gains of the same magnitude. Thus, the value and the magnitude of an event form an S-shaped relationship, which is assumed to be constant across time. Caruso et al. (2008) suggested that time should be added to this valuation function because at least for North Americans, value decreases more sharply in the past than in the future. The present findings support the idea that time is an important factor in determining valuation of events. Moreover, the results suggest that the fit between culture and temporal framing (past vs. future) determines how people value an event. People tend to attach more value to an event when their culture’s temporal orientation fits with the time condition (i.e., Chinese culture with a past event or North American culture with a future event) than when the culture’s temporal orientation and the time condition do not fit (i.e., Chinese culture with a future condition or North American culture with a past condition).

One may wonder whether perceived control is related to such differential values attached to the future and past. European North Americans reported a higher level of perceived control than Asians in Asia (including China, Japan, Korea, and India; for example, Sastry & Ross, 1998). North Americans also place a greater emphasis on control or “influence,” whereas East Asians place a greater emphasis on adjustment (Morling, Kitayama, & Miyamoto, 2002). Greater emphasis on and sense of control is likely to lead people to focus more on the future due to the potential for improving it, whereas a lower sense of control does not give one much advantage for ruminating on the future. Future research is needed to examine such a possible relationship.

Investigating cultural differences in how people value past and future events also has important implications for everyday decision making. For example, Zhao and Meyer (2005) found that American consumers exhibited more excessive willingness to pay for new features of an innovated product before they owned the product than after owning it. In contrast, Chinese consumers may be willing to stay with the products they used before (Yau, 1988) and be less willing to pay for the innovations. In the context of individual performance reviews, employees list past accomplishments to justify advances in their position/salary. Such accomplishments might be undervalued and future potentials might be overvalued in North American contexts relative to Chinese ones.

Caveat

We have shown that Chinese and European North Americans show differential valuations when identical past and future events are pitted against each other: Chinese value a past event more than a future one, whereas European North Americans value a future event more than a past one. It is important to note that we purposely avoided examining cultural differences directly in terms of which group valued future events more and which groups valued past events more. Comparing two cultures directly on their focus on and valuations of future (or past) events is an important research topic, which is beyond the scope of this article.⁹ In the present research, monetary responses were the main dependent variables, which may be affected by factors that systematically vary across cultural groups, such as social economic status, income levels, purchasing power, spending habits, and so on. As a result, directly comparing two cultural groups on means of monetary valuation can be problematic and may lead to misleading conclusions.¹⁰ These concerns, however, are not a problem when our analysis focuses on within-cultural tendencies.

In addition, we did not examine whether people, within their own culture, would value the present more or less than the future (or the past). Thus, the present findings do not speak directly to previous research demonstrating myopia or present bias effect among North Americans (Maddux & Yuki, 2006; Zauberman, Kim, Malkoc, & Bettman, 2009).

The participants in this series of studies were all undergraduate students who were probably more future oriented and less past oriented than other people in the same culture. We should be careful when generalizing the findings based on undergraduate students to other populations. The typical temporal value asymmetry effect among European North American students may be weaker or nonexistent for elderly North Americans. Similarly, the reversed temporal value asymmetry effect among Chinese students may be stronger for elderly Chinese. Further research is needed to examine how the temporal value asymmetry effect may be different across a wider range of participants within a culture.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Claudia Tsui, Chris Humphries, Kelsey Jacobson, and other members in the Culture and Cognition Lab at Queen’s University for their help with this project. We also thank Shinobu Kitayama and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions.

Authors’ Note

This article is based in part on Tieyuan Guo’s PhD dissertation under the guidance of Li-Jun Ji submitted to the Department of Psychology at Queen’s University.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The research was supported by a grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC Grant 410-2009-0904) and the Principal’s Development Fund from Queen’s University to Li-Jun Ji.

Notes

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