Planning for the future: The relationship between conscientiousness, temporal focus and implicit space-time mappings

Abstract

In a broad range of cultures, people implicitly associate the past and future with the back and front in their minds. According to the Temporal Focus Hypothesis (TFH), the metaphoric associations between front-back space and time are shaped by their attentional focus on temporal events. Recent research demonstrates that people's temporal focus and their resulting implicit space-time mappings are malleable and result from a complex of factor. Based on the findings about the interplay between personality trait and temporal reasoning, we investigated whether individual differences in conscientiousness exert additional influences on implicit spatializations of time. Across three studies in laboratory and field settings, we measured students' and non-student adults' conscientiousness based on their self-reports and naturally occurring punctual behavior. Results from these studies showed that participants who conceptualized the future as in front of them evidenced a higher level of conscientiousness trait than those who conceptualized the past as in front of them. These findings shed new light on the TFH by extending the range of individual differences that may influence people's spatial conceptions of time.