By Ted Ideas - Keith Chen
Does the future look like a different world to you, or more like an
extension of the present? In an intriguing piece of research, Keith Chen
suggests that your attitude about the future has a strong relationship
to the language you speak. In a nutshell, some languages refer to the
future using verb helpers like "will" and "shall," while others don't
have specific verbs to refer to future actions. Chen correlated these
two different language types with remarkably different rates of saving
for the future (guess who saves more?). He calls this connection the
"futurity" of languages. The paper is in the process of being published by the American Economic Review,
and it's already generated discussion. Chen says: "While the data I
analyze don’t allow me to completely understand what role language plays
in these relationships, they suggest that there is something really
remarkable to be explained about the interaction of language and
economic decision-making. These correlations are so strong and survive
such an aggressive set of controls, that the chances they arise by
random lies somewhere between one in 10,000 and one in 10^32."
“Every time you discuss the future [in English], grammatically you're
forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it's something
viscerally different.”
Acesse o link para continuar lendo o artigo.
http://www.ted.com/speakers/keith_chen.html
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário