Time to get attention: The effect of temporal focus on health, income and happiness

We study the effect of people’s cultural temporal focus (habits of attending to past or future events) on their health, labour market performance and happiness. Participants’ (N=1177) data were initially collected in 2016 and then again in a follow-up study in 2020-2021. We find that habitually more attending to the future is negatively associated with diseases (heart attack; high cholesterol; diabetes; high-blood pressure; Covid19), but positively with health-related behaviour (eating vegetables and fruit; less smoking), health status (e.g., healthy weight; long life expectancy), income, hourly wage, financial satisfaction and happiness. Furthermore, such temporal values predict participants’ future situation of these aspects of well-being in 2020-2021, even after controlling for the 2016 baseline situation, IQ, self-control, patience, risk aversion and demographic information. Given that habitually attending to the past is likely to lead people to give less priority to the future compared to the past, we propose a temporal values and well-being hypothesis: Temporal values have consequences for people’s planning and behaviour, thus influencing individuals’ concurrent and longitudinal overall well-being. Our findings have strong implications for theories of time perception, measurements of temporal values, and for a better understanding of factors that influence people’s health, income, and happiness.