Time vs. Money

People who are made to think about time end up planning to spend more of it with their friends and family, while those who think about money will be inclined to spend more time working, a new study from the University of Pennsylvania found out.

In our modern society, time is money but if you were to choose between the two, what would be the choice you would make?

This is what Cassie Mogilner, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania wanted to find out so she built an experiment and tested it online, on adults all over the United States.

The experiment aimed to find out how does thinking about money or about time, made people feel, and to do so, volunteers were given a series of sentences to unscramble.

Some study participants were given sentences with words related to time, like 'clock' or 'day', and some had sentences with words like 'dollar' or 'wealth'.

After unscrambling the sentences, the participants were asked what were their plans for the following 24 hours.

Those who had been conditioned to focus on time, said they planned to spend more of it socializing, while those who had been primed to think about money, planned to work more.

Mogilner wanted to now if the effects would be the same for people with lower incomes and after testing them, she found out that the effects regarding time were similar but those concerning money were not.

Without having an actual explanation to this, Mogilner could only speculate that this happened because people with low incomes were already focusing on money, this being one of their primary concerns.

After the online test, the assistant professor of Marketing at the The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to test the effects in the real world, and actually watch the way that people spent their time.

To do so, her research team talked to people going into a cafe on campus, asking them to take part in a questionnaire, which included the same sentence-unscrambling task that prepared them with thoughts about money or time.

After filling in the questionnaire, the team watched to see if the individuals would rather chat with people in the cafe or on the phone, or whether they worked.

The third step of the study consisted in giving the participants another questionnaire about how happy they felt, when they were leaving the cafe.

The results were mostly similar to the first experiment, and people who spent more time socializing declared themselves happy, while those who spent most of their time working were not thrilled when they left.

Obviously, when focusing on money people tend to be more motivated to work, but the author insists that spending all the time working does not make one happy, while spending time with people you care about does.

Mogilner says that “there is so much discussion and focus on money, optimal ways to spend and save it, and the relationship between money and happiness.

“We're often ignoring the ultimately more important resource, which is time.”

Nevertheless, she does not imply that people should all stop working; what she says is that sometimes people need to remember to make room for friends and family.

This study was published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.