One country, two cultures: Implicit space–time mappings in Southern and Northern Vietnamese

Abstract

AbstractWhat determines how people implicitly associate the “past” and “future” with “front” and “back”? According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis (TFH), people's cultural attitudes toward time influence their implicit space–time mappings. However, previous research mainly used cross‐cultural comparison in which the cultures compared differ not only in attentional focus on temporal events, but may also differ in other cultural values. Thus, the specific role of cultural attitudes toward time has not been tested. In the current study, we compared Southern and Northern Vietnamese who have many aspects in common but demonstrate cultural differences in attitudes toward the past and future. The results showed that the two groups of participants tended to think about time according to their temporal focus. Taken together, this pattern of results showed that within‐cultural differences in temporal focus can also predict variation in space–time mappings, which provides further supporting evidence for the TFH.