The future is a thing of possibility
Cross-linguistic differences in modal future time reference affect (risky) intertemporal decisions. Doctoral thesis, Radboud University, 2021.
People tend to devalue outcomes that are risky or far away in time. Most would take $20 now over $20 in five years, and many would take a guaranteed $100 over a 50% chance of $200. How steeply a person devalues risky and delayed outcomes, known as psychological discounting, varies between people, and those differences correlate with behaviors that trade the present against an uncertain future: exercising, saving, managing money.
This thesis asks whether such behavior can be affected by language. Using language elicitation and experimental measures of discounting with speakers of English, Dutch, and German, it tests how differences in these languages’ future time reference grammar shape the way speakers value the future.
Earlier work had focused on future tenses such as will and be going to. The evidence here does not support that tense-based account. Instead, the thesis develops the hypothesis that low-certainty modal verbs drive the effect. English obliges speakers to use a modal verb such as may, might, or could when predicting the future, whereas Dutch allows the present tense. This difference caused English speakers to devalue risky, delayed rewards more than Dutch speakers did; the future tense had no such effect.
The thesis argues that the grammatical obligation to use low-certainty modal verbs, not the future tense, underlies reported correlations between languages’ future time reference systems and behaviors ranging from national efforts to mitigate climate change and personal saving to corporate investment in research and development, accounting practices, and cash holdings.