# Language and economic behaviour: Future tense use causes less not more temporal discounting

## TL;DR

This study shows that using the future tense in language leads to less discounting of future rewards, challenging previous assumptions about how language affects economic behavior.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a novel language-elicitation method to test how future tense use influences temporal discounting.

## Key findings

- English speakers who use the future tense more discount future rewards less, contrary to previous hypotheses.
- Temporal distance is less important than certainty in predicting discounting behavior.
- Cross-cultural differences may stem from low-certainty modal terms rather than future tense obligations.

## Abstract

Previous studies have found cross-cultural correlations between linguistic obligations for talking about future events and economic decisions like saving money. The hypothesis is that a grammatical obligation to use the future tense (e.g. will) causes speakers to perceive future rewards as temporally distal and therefore less valuable (“temporal discounting”). However, no studies have tested whether speakers actually temporally discount as a function of the extent to which they use the future tense. We present two studies which use a novel language-elicitation paradigm to do this, involving speakers of English (which obliges the future tense) and Dutch (which does not). We used mediation analysis to test how language-level differences in the grammatical obligation to use the future tense impact economic decisions via individual language use habits. However, we found that English speakers who habitually make greater use of the future tense actually discount less, not more. These results suggest obligatory future tense use is not responsible for previously-reported cross-cultural correlations. Instead, we suggest that a better explanation involves modal notions of certainty (the probability of an event occurring) rather than temporal distance (when an event will occur). Future tenses express high certainty, which makes the correct prediction that obligatory tense marking should cause less discounting. In contrast, the cross-cultural differences may be driven by variation in other aspects of future time reference, such as low-certainty modal terminology (e.g. may, might).