Language and Economic Behaviour : Future Tense Use Causes Less Not More Temporal Discounting

The grammatical obligation to use the future tense (e.g. will) to speak about future events is hypothesised to cause speakers to perceive future rewards as temporally distal and therefore less valuable ("temporal discounting"). We argue evidence is weak because results interpreted in support of this hypothesis are confounded by future time reference grammars also obliging the use of low-certainty "modal" terms (e.g. may). Further, this account overlooks insights from typological linguistics which characterise future tenses as encoding modal notions of high certainty, which means obligatory use should cause less not more discounting. While many studies have correlated cross-linguistic differences in future grammar with "intertemporal" behaviours argued to be downstream from discounting, no published studies—that we know of—have tested whether the relationship between speaker-level future tense use and temporal discounting is positive or negative. We present three studies which use a novel language-elicitation paradigm to do so, contrasting speakers of English (which obliges the future tense) and Dutch (which does not). In Studies 1 and 2, we used mediation analysis to test whether higher use of the future tense in English resulted in more or less discounting. In both studies we found it resulted in less. We followed this up with a within-language experimental study in which we directed Dutch speakers to talk about the future either using the present or future tense. Again, the future condition resulted in less and not more discounting. These results suggest obligatory future tense use is not responsible for observed correlations between future time grammar and temporal discounting, which go in the opposite direction to our mediated effects. We suggest low-certainty terminology is therefore responsible