Abstract
Temporal Focus Hypothesis (TFH) proposes that people’s implicit space-time mappings are shaped by their attentional focus on temporal events. We used this hypothesis to examine predictions made by psychologists who suggest that the conservatives tend to endorse tradition and are more past-focused while liberals prefer progressive change and are more future-focused. In line with these predictions, we found that the conservatives, who showed more agreement with past-focused statements, were more likely to conceptualize the past as in front of them, whereas liberals, who showed more agreement with future-focused statements, were more likely to conceptualize the future as in front of them. Our results shed new light on the TFH and reveal a relationship between political attitude and implicit space-time mappings.
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Notes
Previous research has shown that there is an interaction between time-of-day, chronotype and spatial conceptions of time (Li 2018). A different line of evidence has also shown that chronotype is related to political ideology. For instance, morning types tend to be more conservative and evening types are more liberal (Ksiazkiewicz 2019). In order to provide a complete picture of people’s spatial conceptions of time, we collected our data throughout a day and used a relatively large sample to exclude individual differences in biographic properties such as chronotype.
All participants in the experiment also responded to 4 items which described thinking about the present in the TFS. However, there were no significant differences among the three groups (p > .50). Since they were unrelated to the main hypothesis, we didn’t report them in the studies.
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Funding
This work was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Southwest University (SWU1909753); Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities”, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law (2722019JCG038).
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This study was approved by the ethical board of the Department of Humanities, Northumbria University and all procedures performed in it involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Li, H., Cao, Y. Time for politics: The relationship between political attitude and implicit space-time mappings. Curr Psychol 41, 1184–1190 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00640-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00640-4