Time to get attention: The effect of temporal focus on health, income and happiness

Yeqiu Zheng, Yan Gu and Arthur van Soest

No 7k4ct_v1, OSF Preprints from Center for Open Science

Abstract: We study the effect of people’s cultural temporal focus (habits of attending to past or future events) on their health, labour market performance and happiness. Participants’ (N=1177) data were initially collected in 2016 and then again in a follow-up study in 2020-2021. We find that habitually more attending to the future is negatively associated with diseases (heart attack; high cholesterol; diabetes; high-blood pressure; Covid19), but positively with health-related behaviour (eating vegetables and fruit; less smoking), health status (e.g., healthy weight; long life expectancy), income, hourly wage, financial satisfaction and happiness. Furthermore, such temporal values predict participants’ future situation of these aspects of well-being in 2020-2021, even after controlling for the 2016 baseline situation, IQ, self-control, patience, risk aversion and demographic information. Given that habitually attending to the past is likely to lead people to give less priority to the future compared to the past, we propose a temporal values and well-being hypothesis: Temporal values have consequences for people’s planning and behaviour, thus influencing individuals’ concurrent and longitudinal overall well-being. Our findings have strong implications for theories of time perception, measurements of temporal values, and for a better understanding of factors that influence people’s health, income, and happiness.

Date: 2023-04-13
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:osfxxx:7k4ct_v1

DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/7k4ct_v1

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