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The effects of language on patience: an experimental replication study of the linguistic-savings hypothesis in Austria

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Silvia Angerer Open the ORCID record for Silvia Angerer [Opens in a new window] ,
Daniela Glätzle-Rützler ,
Philipp Lergetporer  and
Matthias Sutter
Silvia Angerer*
Affiliation:
Institute for Management and Economics in Healthcare, UMIT – Private University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, Eduard-Wallnöfer-Zentrum 1, 6060 Hall in Tirol, Austria
Daniela Glätzle-Rützler
Affiliation:
University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
Philipp Lergetporer
Affiliation:
ifo Institute at the University of Munich and CESifo, Munich, Germany
Matthias Sutter
Affiliation:
University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, Germany University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany
*
e-mail: silvia.angerer@umit.at
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Abstract

The famous linguistic-savings hypothesis states that languages that grammatically separate the future from the present (like English) causally induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future using present tense (like German or Chinese). Chen et al., European Economic Review 120 (2019) experimentally investigate the effect of using future-oriented language on incentivized intertemporal choices and find no support for the hypothesis. We replicate Chen et al., European Economic Review 120 (2019)’s study in the German-speaking context. In our experiment with 332 subjects, we randomly refer to future payments using present or future tense and find no causal effect of language on intertemporal choice. Given the importance of replications for confidence in scientific findings, our results provide corroborating evidence that the linguistic-savings hypothesis is not empirically tenable. Eventually, the results provide a methodological contribution to the conduct of experiments.

Keywords

Intertemporal choiceLanguageExperiment

JEL classification

C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior D90: General‡
Type
Replication Paper
Information
Journal of the Economic Science Association , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , September 2021 , pp. 88 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 Economic Science Association

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