Can language influence thoughts and actions?

"Could your language affect your ability to save money?"  the TED announcer asked as he introduced a recent podcast.  I was doing a daily walk using an iPhone plugged into earphones when I heard this intriguing title.  Two of my favorite topics rolled into one talk - language and economics!

This TED talk was done in February 2013 by behavioral economist Keith Chen from Yale University.  He and his colleagues have been testing an hypothesis concerning the correlation between language structures and monetary savings rates.

Here is the gist of his argument.  Feeding my inner grammar nerd was the observation that some languages (like English) have special structures for future time. Chen calls these languages "futured languages."   We say, "It will rain," adding "will" to the verb, or "It is going to rain," using a progressive form of the verb "to go"  to talk about a future event.

How we conceptualize the world in English

Other languages, like Chinese, do not use a different form of the verb for past, present or future. Chen categorizes them as "futureless languages."  The Chinese sentence would contain the equivalent of the plain verb, "rain."

And since I am often fretting about family money matters (especially trying to find the right balance between spending and saving), I was also intrigued by the idea that my native language structures could be influencing my bank account!

The conclusion reached by Chen (after much statistical analysis) was that when people speak a language that requires a new structure for the future, they tend to disassociate the present from the future, making it harder to save for the future.  The citizens of the United States and Great Britain fall into this category. In Chinese and Finnish, on the other hand, speakers do not change the verb from present to future tense, so they do not see the future as distant, and therefore tend to save more.     

As I thought about the Chen study, a red flag was raised in my mind from the field of Linguistics about the relationship between language and thought.  Linguists have rejected the strongest form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that our language determines how we think about the world. However, linguists do discuss a weaker form of the hypothesis, which allows for some investigation of the issue.

Another reason the Chen study interested me was that it supported my contention that language (and Linguistics, the study of language), has a connection to so many other important topics, in this case, Economics.  I used to tell my Linguistics students, "Linguistics has its finger in everyone else's pie."

If the idea that there is a connection between language and thought interests you as much as it does me, you may want to watch this 12 minute video of Keith Chen presenting his ideas  TED talk.  At the end of the presentation, Chen states that he is looking for tools to make us better savers. And speaking for myself, I do believe that is an idea worth investigating!