The Invisible Rules of Time: Language and Behavior (With Keith Chen)

Learn how subtle linguistic shifts can change the way you make decisions and bridge the gap between who you are today and who you want to be tomorrow.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Katy Milkman?

  Het is 10 uur op een dinsdag en tickets voor een Arctic Monkeys stadiumtour hebben net gegaan op de hand. Ze zijn uit de hand gekocht in seconden en ze kosten een kleine winst.

• 0:20Katy Milkman?

  Twee verschillende college seniors staan op de Ticketmaster countdown timer.

• 0:25Katy Milkman?

  Beide hebben dezelfde dilemma. Ze zorgen om een auto te kopen voor de achtergrond, maar ze willen ook echt deze concert zien. In Londen hebben we Oscar.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Als ik dit ticket...

• 0:38Katy Milkman?

  Hij denkt in Engels.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Ik mis mijn geld. Ik delay het auto.

• 0:45Katy Milkman?

  Will miss. Will delay. In Engels pushen onze grammatie de toekomst in een aparte boek met later. En omdat later verder verder is, hesitaert Oscar, maar dan klikt hij op kopen.

• 1:03Katy Milkman?

  Nu reizen we naar Amsterdam. Hier is Nora. Hoewelijks, hetzelfde Ticketmaster timer, hetzelfde toekomstgoed om een auto te kopen. Maar Nora denkt in Duits, een taal die vaak de present tense gebruikt voor de toekomst.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Als ik dit ticket koop, mis ik mijn spaardoe. Dan moet ik het koop van die auto uitstellen.

• 1:24Katy Milkman?

  In een geval zoals mij, je spreekt niet Duits, wat Nora net zei, wordt geïnterpreteerd tot: Als ik dit ticket koopt, mis ik mijn geld. Ik delay het auto. Het is een subtiele verschil van de manier waarop Oscar over dezelfde beslissing dacht. Maar note de verben die Nora gebruikte. Ik mis. Ik delay. Noch will. Grammatisch, Nors toekomstgoed ligt in dezelfde ruimte als nu. Het gedoneel is instantaneus, dus ze hesitaert en laat de timer gaan.

• 2:00Katy Milkman?

  Het kan misschien klinken verderuit, om een microscopische grammatie in je native taal te kunnen invloeden aan je beslissingen. Maar onderzoek suggereert dat de taal die je spreekt niet alleen verandert hoe je je gedachten uitdrukt, het kan ook je vaakken invloeden. Van hoe je spendt en zet, tot of je rookt, tot of je traint. In deze episode van Choiceology kijken we naar de rol die taal speelt in onze relatie met de tijd en hoe kleine linguïstische schijfjes kunnen de wereld verschil maken tussen wie je is vandaag en wie je wil zijn vandaag.

• 2:43Katy Milkman?

  Ik ben dr. Katie Milkman en dit is Choiceology, een originele podcast van Charles Schwab. Het is een show over de psychologie en economie achter onze beslissingen. We brengen je waardevolle en verrassende verhalen over hoogsteekse keuzes. En dan onderzoeken we hoe deze verhalen verbonden zijn met de volgende onderzoek in behaviorale wetenschap. We doen het allemaal om je te helpen betere beslissingen te maken en kostele schade te voorkomen.

• 3:19Speaker 03

  Leden vragen ons, waar ben je uit? En dan zeggen we altijd, wel, het is complex. We zijn uit Italië, maar we zijn Duitsgeleiders.

• 3:30Katy Milkman?

  Deze particulier Italian-Duitsgeleiders leven in een regio genaamd Zuid-Tirol die hoog in de Alpes is, langs de noordenboog van Italië. Noord-Tirol is een deel van Oosten. En de reden waar deze Tyrolregio's opgescheiden zijn, is omdat van wat het genaamd Brenner Pass is. Maar we komen daarover in een minuut. Voor nu is het belangrijk te weten dat de pass heeft, sinds middeleeuwen, gereden emperors, winkels en armes tussen noorden Europa en Rome. En met hen zijn ze taal. Het betekent dat deze boogland lang een culturele kruisrood is.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  We zijn altijd een plaats geweest waar verschillende culturen ontmoeten. Hoi, mijn naam is Mark Rückler. Ik ben geboren en gegaan in Zuid-Tirol. Ik ben een Duitsgeleider met moedenaar.

• 4:19Katy Milkman?

  In Zuid-Tirol vandaag is Duits het dominantste taal. Maar je hoor ook Italian en een oude lokale taal genaamd Latin. Dat is Latin met een D. Mark's familie heeft hier over generaties bestaan.

• 4:36Katy Milkman?

  Zijn groot grootouders en die voor hen waren huizen, die appels en grapeën hadden als lokale wijnproducteurs. Wanneer de land was een deel van de Austrian Empire, en zo sprak de familie Duits.

• 4:52Katy Milkman?

  Maar toen werd er een wereldoorlog uit. En als een verwachte postoorlogvictorie, Italië nam Zuid-Tirol. Lijkt zich om de Brenner Pass te zorgen als een natuurlijke boog die makkelijker zou worden defensieerd. En zo werd de mappje net over de nacht geraakt. En Mark's familie wakker in een nieuw land. Duitsgeleiders in Italië.

• 5:17Katy Milkman?

  Het was een schijf dat een onzichtbare psychologische boog in de focus bracht. Want de taal die we groeiden spreken geeft meer dan woorden. Het kan ons vaakken van gedachten geven, wat we noteren, hoe we gebeurten beschrijven, zelfs hoe we over tijd spreken. En snel probeerde een nieuw regime dat psychologische boog te schijf doen, door de wet.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  In 1922 kwam Mussolini in de macht. En Mussolini had één grote wil, en dat was Italianeren Zuid-Tirol. En hij deed dat door veel maatregelen te introduceren. Een van die was de verhouding van het Duitsgeleider in de publieke omgeving. Het was absoluut verhoudbaar om Duits te spreken wanneer je interactie met de publieke administratie, op school, etc. Hij deed dat ook door, natuurlijk, alle publieke scholen te vervangen, door scholen te vervangen. Duitsers moesten hun job laten gaan en werden door Italiane leiders vervangen. Dus dit was heel systeematisch.

• 6:22Katy Milkman?

  Als je zoals Mark's familie een Duitsgeleider was, was je niet meer toegestaan om je taal te spreken in de publiek. Het was een schrijm. En dus onder de scherm van de wet, de Duitsgeleiding vertreed zich in wat de kerk opgevonden was, kerkkenkunst, waar kinderen in geheime basementen gecateld werden om hun moedenaar te leren met een kandellicht.

• 6:44Katy Milkman?

  Mark's grandfather was een van deze kinderen en vertelde aan zijn kinderen wat hij en anderen doorheen gingen om hun taal en identiteit te houden.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Als je op school was en je zei maar één woord in Duits, je werd bestraft door de schaaf heel zwaar. En natuurlijk als kind was het voor hem ook een soort traumatisch om het Duitsgeleider niet te gebruiken. Hij moest in school Duits spreken. En dit was natuurlijk voor hem een heel moeilijk tijd.

• 7:14Katy Milkman?

  Dat traum was door een hele generatie van kinderen gevoerd, gezwakt in stilheid. Dan, in 1939, als Europa aan de brug was van de volgende wereldoorlog, gaf de families een ultimatum. De Duits- en Italiane dictatoren Hitler en Mussolini vroegen een deal dat het Zuid-Tirols om een onmogelijk keuze te maken. Staan in Italië en risico dat je taal en cultuur verliep, of ga alles achter en move naar Nazi-Duitsland. De beslissing werd geweten als de optie.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  In deze soort optie in 1939, veel of bijna alle families van Zuid-Tirol moesten kiezen binnen een heel korte tijd, binnen een paar maanden. Als ze het willen staan in Italië met het doel om volledig Italian te worden en hun cultuur en taal moeten worden verwezen. Of move naar het Tertoeil in Duitsland. Adolf Hitler was heel interesseerd om de Zuid-Tirols terug te brengen, zoals hij het vormde. Ik bedoel, natuurlijk was het een heel goede nationalistische verhaal. Maar tweede, natuurlijk, had hij ook de Zuid-Tirols niet alleen als werkvaart, maar ook als soldaten.

• 8:31Katy Milkman?

  Dit ultimatum liet de sociale fabriek van de regio af. Dinner tables werden de handen, als families over wat te doen moesten geven. En heren kwamen zich op de tegenkant van een onzichtbare lijn. Niemand kon weten wat die beslissing echt betekend was. Ultimatisch, een sterk 80% van de Duitsgeleiders van Zuid-Tirol keerde om hun ogenbouwland voor Duitsland te verlaten.

• 9:00Katy Milkman?

  Then World War II erupted and movement between the countries froze. After the war, South Tyrol remained part of Italy, and many who had left for Germany returned, only to find a deep cultural rift waiting for them. The neighbors who had stayed resented those who were now returning. That forced choice left a lasting, deeply painful mark on the region, one that Mark says is still felt today.

• 9:27Speaker 03

  The people who stayed said, "Well, you know, thanks to us, South Tyrol is still German-speaking, and now you're coming back." In the past, every family, you know, how were they connected to one dictatorship or another, or not at all. But this is something, of course, in a small place like South Tyrol, still today is a huge topic.

• 9:49Katy Milkman?

  The end of World War II brought peace to Europe, but it couldn't erase the decades of oppression experienced by German-speaking South Tyrolean. For a long time, the tension between people in the region who spoke different languages simmered just under the surface. Real change didn't arrive until 1972, when a new agreement finally gave South Tyrol the independent power to truly govern itself.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  After many discussions, South Tyrol has chosen this path of internal self-government. And today, what we see in South Tyrol is that we have a very peaceful living together between all the three groups. We can speak our language, live our culture very freely, but we are more living besides each other than together. We know exactly, for example, in which bars the German speakers are going and in what pubs the Italian speakers are going. We have German, Italian, Latin schools, so most of the people, starting from a young age, they attend, for example, let's say, a German school. Generally, we'll have them more German-speaking friends.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  The biggest problem in South Tyrol is really that, you know, we have this system which is very much based on separation.

• 11:08Katy Milkman?

  This peace is built on a trade-off. By institutionalizing that separation, the system finally gave each group the space to preserve its own identity. And woven into that identity is, of course, language. Multiple languages, in fact. Each with their own distinct ways of describing things and experiences, which at face value might not seem so different. But subtle differences have a way of stacking up. Take something as mundane as the weather. If an Italian speaker looks up at incoming clouds, they say, "Domani pioverà." "Tomorrow it will rain." That feels like tomorrow's problem.

• 11:51Katy Milkman?

  But a German speaker can look at the same sky and say, "Morgen regnet es." "Tomorrow it rains." In German, tomorrow is a little closer. And yet, differences of language aside, the result is a region that is remarkably stable, while culturally divided. It's a peaceful, if parallel, reality that would have seemed totally impossible to the children who grew up under the preceding dictatorships, including Mark's grandfather.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  My grandfather always said, he never expected that South Tyrol will become such a great place in such a short period of time, where we can live peacefully and, you know, there's a high standard of minority protection and one of the most prosperous regions in Europe economically. In the last years before he died, he was always telling us, you know, he never thought how the situation will get pacified that quickly and that we should all be happy living in such a great place.

• 12:51Katy Milkman?

  Even so, for that older generation, this modern peace is always sitting right next to more concrete reminders of what they lived through and almost lost.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  When he became older and he was visiting me in my apartment, he had to cross the street where, during fascism, the so-called victory monument has been constructed. And the victory monument is a very debated monument here. I mean, not only because it has been constructed by the fascists, but there's also a Latin sign on it, which says, you know, "We brought to the peasants here in the north the language and the culture." He went by there and came to my apartment, also with 90 years old, he always said, you know, "Always when I'm going by there, this is very difficult for me."

• 13:43Katy Milkman?

  That lingering pain is exactly why today's arrangement is so significant. The German, Italian, and Latin communities may not mix as much as they could, and Mark acknowledges there's room for greater connection. But the deep-seated friction of the past has been replaced by a more durable stability. By maintaining separate schools and distinct local media in each language, the region has traded total integration for a lasting peace. South Tyrol stands as a global model because it proves a fascinating paradox that a strict power-sharing agreement can effectively bring people together by allowing them to stay

• 14:26Katy Milkman?

  distinct. Mark Rogla is the head of the European nonprofit Center for Autonomy Experience, which is dedicated to minority protection in South Tyrol. You can learn more about his work in our show notes and at schwab.com/choicology. In South Tyrol, language has shaped history, identity, and the literal borders of a region. Mark's grandfather risked his safety in secret basement catacomb schools just to speak his mother tongue. The decisions his family made back then would echo for generations, shaped not just by

• 15:08Katy Milkman?

  politics and economics, but by the very language they were fighting so hard to preserve. Because, as we are about to hear, language does more than tether us to our cultural roots. It also alters how we perceive time itself, whether we view the future as a distant, separate reality, or as an immediate continuation of the present. And it turns out, that subtle grammatical quirk has profound real-world consequences from a young age. Looking closely at these exact same communities, economist Matthias Suter and colleagues discover that this linguistic divide is directly tied to a child's self-control. Suter found that German-speaking elementary schoolers, whose language blends the present

• 15:52Katy Milkman?

  and the future tenses, were 16 percentage points more likely to wait patiently for a larger reward than their Italian-speaking neighbors, who use distinct tenses for the future. It's a striking finding, and it was inspired by the work of my next guest. His foundational research is what prompted Suter and his team to test this theory in the unique linguistic laboratory of South Tyrol. Keith Chen is a professor of behavioral economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, and he'll explain how the language we speak can change our decisions. Hi, Keith. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me today.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  Hi, it's so nice to be here.

• 16:32Katy Milkman?

  I'm really excited to talk to you about your amazing work on linguistics and the decisions we make about the present and the future. And I was hoping you could just start, actually, by giving us some baseline knowledge about what it means for a language to grammatically associate the future with the present. What is that exactly?

• 16:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's a really interesting topic, and one that, like, when you talk with people about, they don't realize how different languages can be on this very, very basic dimension. So what my work studies and what we're talking about is this basic difference in language with respect to something we all learned in grade school, the future tense. You were all listening to this podcast in English. English is a language that has a past tense and a future tense, and linguists would describe English as a strong future-time reference language, okay? Well, what does that mean? What that means is that broadly speaking, there are a few kind of corner exceptions, but broadly speaking, when you're talking with someone else in English and you're talking

• 17:34Speaker 04

  about a time or an event that's supposed to happen in the future, you have to mark it grammatically. Mandarin, all forms of Chinese are languages that have neither a past tense nor a future tense, they have no tense structure at all. So that's this basic difference. And what a lot of my work studies is whether or not the ways that your language kind of forces you to note and think about time influence how you make choices that depend on time.

• 18:02Katy Milkman?

  I was hoping you could describe your empirical research showing that languages that grammatically associate the future with the present tend to foster more future-oriented decisions about everything from savings to exercise to smoking than languages that...

• 18:18Katy Milkman?

  Have this greater distinction between the present and the future?

• 18:22Speaker 04

  Absolutely. So, one thing that economists have studied a lot that really, really matters for kind of human welfare and, you know, human progress is the savings rates of nations. And very quickly, what I saw was countries where the dominant language in that country makes no grammatical distinctions between the present and the future tend to save more. So, kind of average savings rates in countries where the future and the present are linguistically similar are 6% higher of GDP than countries that don't, on average. And that holds both within like developed countries, like OECD countries, and kind of more broadly, and just kind of like all countries in the world.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  And, you know, that, that's true even after you control for many things that influence this, like, you know, the stability of the legal system, you know, all kinds of features of countries that, that we've been investigating. I started thinking, that's an interesting fact about countries. But in the, in the final instance, you know, languages are spoken by people. And does it also appear to be true of people? And so, one of the things that I did to kind of push this hypothesis further, really, really try and stress test it, is it turns out, in the world, there are nine countries, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Estonia, the Congo, Nigeria, Malaysia, Singapore,

• 19:52Speaker 04

  and Switzerland, in particular, that are multilingual. So, these countries are, are an interesting test case because then, basically, you can find families that live within a mile of each other, whose kids attend the same schools, who have access to the same educational systems, banking systems, you know, they're citizens of the same country, they have the same family structure, same number of kids, they're in the same income percentile of their, of their countries. But one of these families speaks a futureless language at home, and one of these families speaks a language that breaks the future from the present. This was really surprising to me. But basically, when you zoom in on these matched pairs of families in these countries,

• 20:36Speaker 04

  I basically couldn't find a future-oriented behavior that wasn't different systematically between these families. So, families that speak languages that have a more disconnected future in the present are over 30% less likely to have saved in any given year. They are noticeably more likely to smoke, they're noticeably less likely to say that they exercised on the day of the survey. And that's true in Switzerland, between Italian and German-speaking families. That's true in Nigeria, between Hausa-speaking families and, and their neighbors. That's true in Estonia, between Estonian and Russian-speaking families.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  Basically, across all nine of these countries that have kind of both future and futureless languages amongst their native speakers, these matched families look very different in future-oriented behavior.

• 21:30Katy Milkman?

  And, and to be concrete about that, those are things like savings, smoking, exercising. What are some of the other things that you measured?

• 21:37Speaker 04

  I basically looked at every kind of savings survey, every values survey, and every health survey I could find across these countries, and it's there in everything. So, smoking, if you value the future more, you smoke less today. Exercise, if you value the future more, you exercise more today. Just outright savings. If you think about this accumulating over a lifetime in kind of health, you see these effects in health surveys.

• 22:06Katy Milkman?

  That's really interesting. And of course, you know, the, the natural thing that comes to my mind, because like you, I've been trained to think like a, you know, an economist, a scientist, who is constantly worried that there's confusion between correlation and causation.

• 22:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:22Katy Milkman?

  What makes you confident that there isn't some funky cultural difference between the languages that have this disconnect between how we speak about now and later, and the languages that have more continuity that's driving this, as opposed to the language I speak myself, if that makes sense?

• 22:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 22:42Katy Milkman?

  Yeah. Maybe richer countries, you know, richer families, families that come from more money tend to speak languages that have less disconnect, and that's why you see higher savings rates and better health.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So, you know, to put it bluntly, right, the thing that you'd be really worried about is if this is only about Germans versus Italians, like, we have a lot of intuitions about how German culture is different than Italian culture, why would we suspect that this is only coming from some feature of their language? Or, you know, that former English colonies are more likely to speak kind of English? How do we know that that process didn't kind of also embed different cultural values, different institutions, all kinds of different things that can affect future-oriented behavior? That's a really deep worry, and, and I would say several things kind of speak against that. And to be honest, I tried my hardest to break this with, with those kinds of worries in

• 23:38Speaker 04

  mind, and, and I couldn't. The thing that you would really worry about is that cultural traits may both be correlated with and have co-evolved with linguistic traits. One thing, even in the aggregate data, that makes you worry a little bit less about that is that we also have value surveys of all of these people. So, for example, there's something called the World Value Survey, and one of the questions in that survey is, hey, on a scale from one to 10, how important do you think savings is as just a human value? Saving for the future, how important is that as a human value? Are you an ant, or are you a grasshopper? Just basically, are you a saver, or are you, you know, live for today? Like, you know, which, which do you think is the more important value?

• 24:20Speaker 04

  And absolutely, people who say an important cultural value is, is to be thrifty and to save, save more. Like, you see that clearly, like, and it would be amazing if you didn't find that. But statistically, the value effect, your answer to those value questions and its effect on your savings is completely statistically independent from the linguistic effect and how that appears to affect your savings.

• 24:46Katy Milkman?

  That's really interesting.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, that is to say, you know.

• 24:49Katy Milkman?

  It's not culture that's correlated with language in this way.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 24:55Katy Milkman?

  Creating this relationship.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  At least not to the degree that that cultural value is conscious and is captured by asking you, like, how much do you think your culture values savings?

• 25:04Katy Milkman?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 04

  So, that's, that's kind of thing one.

• 25:07Katy Milkman?

  One bit of evidence, yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  That's one, what's one bit of evidence. The other bit of evidence, and this is work by Ian Ayers, Tamar Katz, and Tali Reggev, three kind of lawyers and cognitive, law professors and cognitive scientists. They did this fascinating experiment after reading my paper. What they basically did was, was they went online, and they found, I think, something like 8,000 people who self-reported being fluent in more than one language, where at least one of those languages strongly associates the future and the present, and, and one of those languages breaks the future and the present in their grammar.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  And what they did is so simple, I, I kind of kick myself for not having done this. They basically just randomized, like, what language do you ask them a bunch of questions in? And those questions are basically like, what would you rather have, $10 today or $15 a week from now?

• 26:07Katy Milkman?

  Which is a very good interest rate, by the way.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, which is a fantastic interest rate, something you should absolutely take the 15, if, if that's.

• 26:14Katy Milkman?

  Right.

• 26:14Speaker 04

  If, if you ever get.

• 26:15Katy Milkman?

  If you're patient at all.

• 26:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, but most people, most people say no.

• 26:19Katy Milkman?

  Most people prefer $10 now because they're present biased.

• 26:22Speaker 04

  Because they're present biased, that's right.

• 26:23Katy Milkman?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  It turns out, if you ask someone, say, you, you find someone who's a bilingual in Mandarin, Chinese, and English, and you ask them this question in Chinese, they're more likely to take the 15 than that exact same person if you ask them the question in English. And that's true, not just for a kind of Chinese and English, but it's true for Russian and Estonian, and it's true for, it's true for like, basically every language pair that they could find a significant sample of.

• 26:52Katy Milkman?

  So interesting. Yeah, so that really does a beautiful job of getting at this causality question. I love that. Could you talk a little bit about why it is that you think the way we talk about the future affects our propensity to make future-oriented decisions like saving and exercising and so on?

• 27:09Speaker 04

  If your language strongly separates the future from the present, the future just feels more distant. And if it feels more distant, it's going to make it harder for you to take all of those tough decisions, like saving, like exercising, like all of those things. So, call that like the distance hypothesis, that if your language grammatically, you know, makes future events grammatically more distant, then, then that might lead to a psychological effect where the future feels more distant.

• 27:41Katy Milkman?

  Right, you have to wait longer for those positive consequences to accrue from exercising, and so, they're worthless.

• 27:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And there are a lot of clues that language has that effect. So, for example, there is in English studies and in literature studies, this, this longstanding recognition of something called the historic-present. And that is that when we're talking about past events, one common literary strategy is to speak in the present tense about a past event to make it feel more immediate. So, for example, you can say, there was President Lincoln taking a vote in this cabinet as to whether to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. Okay? I'm speaking in the present tense, even though I think we all understand that this is not happening right now.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  And commonly, kind of like, this is understood to have the effect of pulling you into that past event and making it feel more immediate by speaking in the present tense. So, one hypothesis would be, well, if your language in some sense lacks a past tense or lacks a future tense, then is it true that that same effect holds? And, and both past and future events just feel more like the present?

• 28:59Katy Milkman?

  Wow. So, it sounds like doing this research has made you just recognize that language has more implications than we maybe realize, and that our choice of words and our choice of the way we express something can really shape important decisions. Is that an accurate summary?

• 29:15Speaker 04

  Absolutely, absolutely. And I do think one implication of this research is many different strategies, both linguistic, both kinds of habitual and kind of perspective-taking, things which make your future feel more.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Kind of-

• 29:32Katy Milkman?

  Like it's the here and now.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, things that make the future more vivid, things that make the future feel more like the present can have big effects on our behavior.

• 29:42Katy Milkman?

  Yeah, I love that as a takeaway. This has been such an interesting conversation. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today, Keith. Thank you so much.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  Thank you so much. I've enjoyed our time together so much.

• 29:57Katy Milkman?

  Keith Chen is a professor of behavioral economics at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. You can learn more about his work on linguistic relativity and how language affects your decisions in the show notes and at schwab.com/choysology.

• 30:16Katy Milkman?

  If this episode got you thinking about how language shapes the way we see the future, there's an episode of the Financial Decoder podcast called, "How Do You Offer Financial Guidance to a College Grad?" It focuses on how language and framing, not just the advice itself, can make all the difference in helping someone take action. Check it out at schwab.com/financialdecoder or in your favorite podcast app.

• 30:44Katy Milkman?

  I opened this episode by sharing the story of two college students staring at a countdown timer, making the same decision about whether to splurge on concert tickets, but experiencing it in subtly different ways. Oscar's English grammar made losing out on his goal of soon owning a car a future problem, nor his Dutch held it in the present. One small grammatical change and two very different choices. As Keith Chen's research shows, the language you speak and the way it makes you feel about the distance between now and later can have important implications for our savings and health decisions.

• 31:26Katy Milkman?

  That's a remarkable amount of influence from a verb tense. The people of South Tyrol can't easily swap their mother tongue. But the good news is, you don't have to. If you want to be more future oriented, there are other ways we can bridge the gap between the way we think about ourselves now and in the future. For instance, Keith's UCLA colleague Hal Hirschfeld is a psychologist who has shown that you can take steps to feel closer to future you, which can lead to more patient choices. You can write a letter to yourself 20 years down the road. You can interact with an age progressed photo or even converse with an AI-generated version of your older self.

• 32:10Katy Milkman?

  And all of these exercises will help you make better, more future-oriented decisions.

• 32:27Katy Milkman?

  That wraps this episode of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you want to dive deeper into the science of behavior change or if you're ready to take these insights and put them in practice in your own life, you can find plenty of practical strategies in my book, How to Change, or join the conversation over at Milkman Delivers on Substack. And if you learned something today or we helped you think a little differently, we'd love it if you could leave the show a quick rating on Spotify or a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other decision makers find us. Finally, make sure to hit the follow button in your app so you never miss a chance to sharpen your choices. I'm Dr. Katie Milkman. Talk to you soon.