In the current study, adults were asked directly to what extent they agreed that they experience time passing—‘feeling’ and ‘seeing’ time pass—and about the extent to which they endorse certain beliefs about time. We acknowledge that the term ‘experience’ can be understood in a number of ways (see, e.g., Hinton’s [1973, ch. 1] discussion). The precise nature of participants’ understanding of the appeal to experience was not our main focus, though it might be usefully investigated more systematically in future studies. However, we found it worthwhile to explicitly distinguish between claims to ‘feel’ and ‘see’ time passing. While we cannot guarantee that participants are responding with one particular conception of ‘experience’, ‘see’, or ‘feel’ in mind, we predicted greater agreement with the ‘feel’ claim than with ‘see’ for two reasons. First, ‘feel’ is commonly used in a broader sense than that of perceptual phenomenology (and while ‘see’ may sometimes be so used, this is plausibly less common). Second, when ‘feel’ is used to refer to perceptual phenomenology, there are cases in which we might feel change or passage happening (one’s breathing or heartbeat, for example) even though we cannot see it happening (when in complete darkness, for example). Hence, we would expect those who claim to see time passing to also claim to feel time passing, and we would predict that some participants will claim to feel, but not see, time passing.Footnote 12
As discussed previously, whether people report experiencing time passing might plausibly be related to their conception of what it means to say that time passes. If participants differ in their understanding of what it means for time to pass this might plausibly also affect how their experience has to present itself to them in order for them to believe that they have an experience as of time as passing. In order to investigate this relationship, we asked participants what they believe that it means to say that time passes, and we also asked what reasons they take themselves to have for choosing the meaning that they do. It will take a great deal more than the exploratory work presented here to gain a full understanding of these relationships, but we take our study to present an important first step.
How subjects report their own temporal phenomenology may also be associated with other, independent tacit beliefs about time. These relationships are likely to be complex and interdependent, and it may be difficult to discern their direction. We can nevertheless approach some of these relationships in an exploratory way by identifying candidate independent beliefs. Some of these beliefs might concern the relation between change in the world and people’s temporal experience. For instance, if subjects believe that if nothing changes then time does not pass, this may reflect a tacit inference that time’s passage is to be defined in terms of change in the world. Given the ubiquity of change in the world, we might expect those who make such a claim also to claim to feel or see time passing. Belief in a force such as fate may also be associated with reports about temporal phenomenology, where a belief in fate, or religious beliefs that may for some subjects entail a kind of fatalism, might imply a belief that the future already exists, such that reality is static and no change in what exists over time is required—i.e., time does not pass.
If there is variation in participants’ reports about experiencing time passing, such a discrepancy might arise from various differences between individuals. We therefore also asked about demographic factors such as age (assuming that with age we accumulate a greater number of episodic memories, and that this may influence a person’s beliefs about the passage of time); education (which might increase the awareness that one’s experiences are not always veridical); and media or print exposure to scientists’ views about the nature of time.
Method
Ethical approval for this study was received from the research ethics committee of the second author’s institution.
Participants
Data collection took place both online using the Qualtrics platform and in person using paper questionnaires. Participants who took part online were recruited from the Prolific online subject pool (Peer et al. 2017) and a subject pool for undergraduate psychology students at the second author’s institution. Paper questionnaires were completed at a series of research outreach events for the general public. Two hundred and twenty-five people participated online (M = 29.51 years, SD = 10.44, range: 18–67 years, 89 males), and 204 people participated at the outreach events (M = 37.82 years, SD = 16.53, range: 18–84 years, 85 males). Four participants who took part at outreach events did not report their age, and five participants who took part at outreach events did not report their gender. The full sample thus comprised 429 adults (M = 33.42 years, SD = 14.25, range: 18–84 years, 174 males). Potential participants approached via the Prolific subject pool all stated that they were fluent in English when registering with the pool and confirmed this when beginning the questionnaire.
Materials
Participants who were part of the Prolific subject pool or the undergraduate subject pool completed the questionnaire on desktop, laptop, or mobile devices. Participants who responded at outreach events completed the questionnaire on paper. Participants who were part of the Prolific subject pool each received compensation of £1.33 UK pounds. Those who were part of the undergraduate subject pool received course credit.
Design and procedure
The study comprised of four Temporal Phenomenology statements, two Meaning of Temporal Passage questions, five Beliefs Related to Time statements, and three Demographics questions. All participants first provided informed consent, and then their age and gender. Participants who completed the questionnaire online answered the Meaning of Temporal Passage question first and then rated their level of agreement with the Temporal Phenomenology Statements before responding to the Beliefs Related to Time statements, and finally the Demographics questions. Participants who completed the questionnaire on paper responded to the Temporal Phenomenology statements prior to responding to the Meaning of Temporal Passage question, advanced to the Beliefs Related to Time statements, and finally completed the Demographics questions. Participants were randomly allocated to one of four conditions, each of which presented the questions within the Temporal Phenomenology and Beliefs Related to Time sections in a different quasi-randomized order. Online participants were not able to skip any questions; a small number of participants who completed the questionnaire on paper skipped some questions, yielding slightly different ns across questions for the analyses below.
Temporal phenomenology statements
Participants saw a scale running from 0 to 100, where 100 represented ‘completely agree’ and 0 represented ‘completely disagree’. A red dot was situated at the midpoint of the scale (50). The accompanying text asked participants to move the dot along a sliding scale (online completion) or mark a point on the scale (paper completion) to indicate the number that best reflected how much they agreed or disagreed with a statement. As online participants moved the dot, they saw a number reflecting its current location on the scale. Participants were also informed of a ‘Don’t Know’ option.
Four Temporal Phenomenology statements were presented. Participants who completed the questionnaire online also responded to an additional initial practice statement (Fig. 1), ‘Ripe bananas are delicious’, which was always presented first. When online participants moved the slider in response to the practice statement, they received feedback based on the number they chose (0–25, ‘This means you dislike ripe bananas’; 25–49, ‘This means you don’t like ripe bananas all that much’; 50–74, ‘This means you quite like ripe bananas’; 75–100, ‘This means you really like ripe bananas’). If online participants selected the ‘Don’t Know’ option in response to the practice statement, they then answered an additional question: ‘Which is closer to what you were thinking when you selected this option?’ Three statements were presented, from which participants were required to choose one: ‘I don’t personally know to what extent the statement is true or untrue’, ‘I don’t think it is possible to know to what extent the statement is true or untrue’, and ‘I don’t understand the question’. After choosing one of these statements, online participants saw the statement ‘When you choose ‘Don’t Know’, you will always be given the three options that you just saw’ followed by a reiteration of the three options. Participants who completed a questionnaire on paper did not receive a practice question, since marking a point on a line was likely to be a more familiar task than moving an online slider. Participants who received questionnaires on paper could also select a ‘Don’t Know’ option followed by the same three ‘Don’t Know’ alternatives printed underneath each question.
Participants then read a number of statements describing potential features of one’s temporal phenomenology and were asked to move the slider (online) or mark a point (on paper) to indicate how much they agreed with each statement. Two phenomenological claims were offered. Each was presented twice, once in the positive (‘I feel time passing’ and ‘I see time passing’) and once in the negative (‘I do not feel time passing’ and ‘I do not see time passing’), yielding four statements in total (Table 2).
Table 2 Extent of agreement with Temporal Phenomenology and Beliefs Related to Time statements Beliefs Related to Time statements
Participants saw five statements describing certain beliefs about time. Two of these statements (‘Humans perceive every aspect of time’ and ‘Our experience of time tells us something about time that science can’t’) are not discussed here as they are not the focus of the current study. The remaining three statements are presented in Table 2. Participants again moved a dot along a sliding scale (online) or marked a point on the scale (paper) to indicate the number that best reflected how much they agreed or disagreed with a statement. Two of these statements formed a pair, one phrased positively and one phrased negatively (e.g., ‘Time passes even if nothing changes’ and ‘If nothing changes, time does not pass’) as a check on comprehensibility.
Meaning of Temporal Passage question and reasons
Participants were presented with four statements and asked to rank them according to how well they described what it means for time to pass, starting with 1 (best describes what it means for time to pass), then 2 (the next best statement), and so on (Fig. 2). Participants were presented with two statements that were putatively A-theoretic (‘Things move from the future to the present to the past’ and ‘What time is now changes’) and two statements that were consistent with the B-theory (‘One thing happens at one time, another thing happens at another time’ and ‘Different things happen at different times’). Participants were then presented with five possible reasons for thinking that their top-ranked statement was the best way to describe what it means for time to pass (Fig. 3), the last of which was ‘Other’, and selected as many reasons as applied. If ‘Other’ was among the options chosen, the participant was invited to state their reason by typing a response into a free text box.
Demographics questions
At the conclusion of the questionnaire participants were asked about the level of their highest qualification on a 9-point scale (according to levels of qualifications obtainable in the UK and in Ireland), how often within the last three years they were exposed to information in the media or in print about the scientific study of time (never; once; two or three times; more than two or three times), and whether or not they believe in a God (no, not sure, or yes).
Data scoring and analysis
Participants’ responses on negatively worded statements were reverse-scored by subtracting the value of each response from 100. For the purposes of analysis and classification of participants (see below), dichotomized scores were calculated for Temporal Phenomenology statements by categorizing values over 50 as agreement with the statement, values below 50 as disagreement with the statement, and values of 50 (the midpoint) as missing. Pairs of positively and negatively worded statements demonstrated acceptable, but not excellent reliability (Spearman-Brown split-half coefficients between .707 and .794). For this reason, we did not collapse responses to pairs of positively and negatively worded statements prior to analysis. Given the complexity of the domain and the possibility that participants were reflecting on their own beliefs related to time and temporal phenomenology for the first time, the fact that reliability ratings are moderate rather than high is perhaps unsurprising.
Results
Means, 95% confidence intervals, and reliability between pairs of positively and negatively worded Temporal Phenomenology and Beliefs Related to Time statements are reported in Table 2. ‘Don’t Know’ responses were excluded from analyses, yielding slightly different ns for the analyses below. Across Temporal Phenomenology and Beliefs Related to Time statements, the number of participants who chose any one of the three Don’t Know options ranged from 0 (0%) to 25 (5.87%). Very few participants stated that they did not understand the question (range: 0 (0%) to 8 (2.05%)). Responses to the Meaning of Temporal Passage question are presented in Fig. 2.
First, we checked whether the order in which participants completed the questionnaire (i.e., Temporal Phenomenology statements preceding or following Meaning of Temporal Passage statements) had an impact on responding. There was no significant order effect on participants’ responses to the Temporal Phenomenology statements, regardless of whether the question was phrased positively or negatively (all ps > .110).
Temporal Phenomenology Statements
We next examined participants’ responses to the Temporal Phenomenology statements. The modal score was 100 for both positively worded statements and 0 for both negatively worded statements, indicating that the most common response to the positively worded statements was complete agreement and the most common response to the negatively worded statements was complete disagreement. Wilcoxon signed-ranks tests revealed that participants agreed significantly more strongly that they feel time passing than that they see time passing, both for positively worded statements (z = − 4.13, p < .001) and negatively worded statements (z =− 3.41, p < .001).
On the basis of dichotomized responses, 83% of participants indicated agreement with the statement ‘I feel time passing’ (that is, gave a response that was equal to or above 51), and 78% indicated agreement with the statement ‘I see time passing’. Seventy-eight percent of participants indicated disagreement with the statement ‘I do not feel time passing’, and 73% indicated disagreement with the statement ‘I do not see time passing’. Dichotomized responses for positive and negative question pairs were largely consistent with one another: 84.1% of participants were consistent across the ‘feel time pass’ pair and 82.7% were consistent across the ‘see time pass’ pair. For positively worded questions a small minority claimed to see, but not to feel time passing (n = 26; 6.8%) and a slightly larger minority claimed to feel, but not to see time passing (n = 45; 11.8%). A McNemar test demonstrated that the proportion of participants who claimed to see, but not to feel time pass when answering positively worded questions was significantly lower than the proportion who claimed not to see, but to feel time passing (p = .032). For negatively worded questions, similar results were apparent: a small minority of participants claimed that they do not see, but do feel time passing (n = 51; 13.18%), and this was significantly higher than the proportion of participants who claimed that they do see, but do not feel time passing (n = 26; 6.72%, p = .006).
Thus, the majority of participants believed themselves both to feel and to see time passing. Participants believed more strongly that they feel time passing than that they see time passing; as we expected ‘feel’ to be understood as a broader experiential notion, this result is as we predicted. Nonetheless, the most common response both in the case of claiming to see and to feel time passing was complete agreement that this was the case.
Meaning of temporal passage questions
Next, we examined participants’ responses to the Meaning of Temporal Passage question and the reasons that they gave for their answer. Recall that participants ranked four statements according to how well they described what it means for time to pass on a scale of 1–4 (where 1 represented the top rank and 4 the lowest rank) and then selected as many reasons for their choice as were applicable. Figure 2 presents the ranks assigned by participants to each Meaning of Temporal Passage statement, and Fig. 3 stratifies endorsement of reasons by top-ranked statement.
It can be seen from Fig. 2 that the two putatively A-theoretic statements received higher rankings than the two statements that are consistent with the B-theory. A Friedman test indicated significant differences between the ranks assigned by participants to statements (χ2 (1) = 171.39, p < .001). Dunn-Bonferroni post hoc tests revealed statistically significant differences in ranked position between every pair of statements, with the exception of the two statements consistent with a B-series conception of time. Thus, the A-theoretic statement ‘Things move from being in the future to being in the present to being in the past’ was ranked significantly higher than the A-theoretic statement ‘What time is now changes’. Both of these A-theoretic statements were ranked significantly higher than either of the two statements that were also consistent with the B-theory (‘Different things happen at different times’ and ‘One thing happens at one time, another thing happens at another time’).
When asked to select one or more reasons for their choice of top-ranked statement, more than half of participants endorsed ‘Because I experience things this way’ and ‘Because I see things changing over time’. Over 40% endorsed ‘Because I can compare what’s happening now with what I can remember’, over 20% endorsed ‘Because things that can be altered at one time become fixed at a later time’, and 7.5% provided their own reason. A series of chi-square tests on the four specific reasons presented to participants indicated that whether a subject endorsed one of these reasons did not differ as a function of the first-ranked statement that the reasons were intended to explain (all ps > .277). The overall pattern of results was largely consistent across first-ranked statements (Fig. 3). Thus, regardless of whether participants first-ranked an interpretation of what it means for time to pass that was more distinctively A-theoretic or one that was also consistent with the B-theory, they tended to explain their interpretation in terms of their experience, in terms of seeing change, and, to a lesser extent, in terms of memory.
Classification of participants
We proceeded to classify participants on the basis of their responses to both Temporal Phenomenology and Meaning of Temporal Passage statements (n = 358; Fig. 4). Responses to ‘seeing time pass’ paired questions and ‘feeling time pass’ paired questions were initially considered separately. Participants were coded as seeing time pass if they endorsed the ‘I see time passing’ statement (score 51–100) and rejected ‘I do not see time passing’ (score 0–49). The same coding was applied to the ‘feeling time pass’ question pair. Among participants who were consistent across positive and negative question pairs, 87.5% were coded as feeling time pass and 80.7% as seeing time pass. Participants were subsequently classified according to the system given in Table 1. The percentage of participants who were classified in each category is shown in Fig. 4. The plot also shows the distributions of participants’ scores for the positively worded statements ‘I feel time passing’ and ‘I see time passing’ (for simplicity, negatively worded responses are not plotted). From the figure, it can be seen that the modal response for passage- and change-experiencers to these statements was 100, whereas there was no clear modal response for passage- or change-non-experiencers. A chi-square test indicated that there was no statistical association between being an experiencer and selecting an A- or B-theoretic Meaning of Temporal Passage statement (χ2 = .13, p = .72).
Beliefs related to time statements and demographics questions
Finally, we conducted exploratory analyses to compare the responses of experiencers and non-experiencers, and of participants who endorsed distinctively A-theoretic and B-theory-consistent Meaning of Temporal Passage statements, to Beliefs Related to Time statements and Demographics questions. We were unable to compare responses to these questions across all four groups into which we had classified participants (passage-experiencers, change-experiencers, passage-non-experiencers, change-non-experiencers) due to loss of statistical power and empty cells resulting from the small number of participants in the change-non-experiencer group.
We began by comparing participants who endorsed distinctively A-theoretic Meaning of Temporal Passage statements to those who chose versions of these statements also compatible with the B-theory, regardless of their claims about their temporal experience. A Welch’s independent t test demonstrated that participants who endorsed A-theoretic statements (M = 5.81, SD = 1.56) were better-educated than those who endorsed statements compatible with the B-theory (M = 5.36, SD = 2.03; t (128.73) = 2.01, 95% CI [.01, .90], p = .046). No other comparisons were statistically significant (all ps > .376).
We then compared experiencers (participants who claimed to experience time passing: that is, those who were coded as either ‘feeling time pass’ or ‘seeing time pass’) and non-experiencers (that is, those who were coded as neither feeling nor seeing time pass), regardless of their choice of Meaning of Temporal Passage statement. A chi-square test demonstrated that experiencers were more likely to be educated to a standard at or above high-school leaving (examinations at the age of approximately 18) than non-experiencers, p = .02. However, the presence of only 24 non-experiencers in the sample renders this conclusion tentative. No other comparisons were statistically significant (all ps > .079).