In a world in which every third research finding gets described as "surprising" – how else are academics supposed to get invited to global conferences? – it's hard to convey the feeling of being genuinely surprised by (of all things) a paper on economics and language. But I'll try: I'll go so far as to say I was startled to read a study by the Yale economist Keith Chen, suggesting that which language we speak determines how likely we are to engage in various bad habits, from failing to save for retirement to smoking and overeating. Chen claims the reason the Greeks and the Brits, for example, rack up more debt and smoke more than the Germans and speakers of Mandarin Chinese is the fact that they speak Greek or English. Like I say: startling.
Languages can be divided into those that use grammar to make a strong distinction between the present and the future (linguists say these have strong "future time reference" or FTR) and those that blur the two (weak FTR). Where you'd say, "I'm going to buy a house" in English, which is a strong FTR language, you'd say, "I buy house" in Mandarin, with the timing implied by the context. Chen's number-crunching revealed extraordinary correlations. Weak-FTR speakers are 24% less likely to smoke and 29% more likely to exercise; strong-FTR speakers saved far less money. Chen's argument is that the more you think of the future as a radically different thing, the easier it is not to worry about how too many cigarettes – or too little money – might cause problems in that future. It's not your fault you're a wreck. It's your grammar's.
Predictably but understandably, Chen's findings were also correlated with smoke emerging from the ears of many linguists. The idea that language shapes our thoughts – the "Whorfian hypothesis" – is hugely controversial. Instead of grammar influencing behaviour, mightn't cultural factors determine both grammar and behaviour? Chen did control for religion, class, education and many others. But brain-jolting hypotheses can be useful thinking tools, whether or not they're correct. And Chen's draws attention to our tendency (or rather mine – who knows if every German concurs?) to think of our present and future selves as different people.
I'm struck by how my sense of my "present self" extends, quite specifically, for about eight years. Me at 43 is just me at 36 with an even dickier knee; but 50-year-old me is some other chap entirely. (In my mind's eye, weirdly, he's actually less bald.) Then again, I think of next-week-me as different from present-me, too. Many self-help tricks – such as stating your future goals in the present tense – are based on manipulating the relationship between these selves. But would we need tricks if we could truly come to feel that all these "me"s were one?
In his book Staring At The Sun, the psychotherapist Irving Yalom suggests that this is exactly what we need to do to reconcile ourselves to the big one: death. One of his clients told him that the revelation "came from realising it would be me who will die, not some other entity, like Old-Lady-Me". Once we grasp that everything that'll ever happen to us, including death, will happen to the same person, Yalom argues, we'll make wiser choices, but also live far more intensely. Whatever grammar's role, that's surely not a goal to be left exclusively to the Germans and Chinese.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com; twitter.com/oliverburkeman
