The surprising links between anger and time perception | Hacker News Reader

The surprising links between anger and time perception

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30 pointskqr218 comments

You can test this on yourself by considering which day of the week a meeting has changed to, if it was originally planned for Wednesday but has been moved forward two days.

I had to read this sentence ten times before I realized how it can be interpreted any different from the meeting is on Friday.

I realized I was assuming forward meant to the right on a calendar, but that means my default way of interpreting relative times is inaccurate. If they had said "back" instead of "forward," I would have also thought Friday. Clearly, if antonyms indicate the same thing to me, then I'm the one who's wrong, but it's still surprising to me.

The only phrase that would make me think Monday is, I think, "push the meeting up." But, while I would think Friday if it was "push the meeting back," the phrase "push the meeting down" sounds nonsensical to me.

This is why natural language processing is hard.

I've been facinated with people's spacial associations with time since I first realized they can vary from person to person. I like to ask people how they visualize the arrangement of months in a year, because there doesn't appear to be any single standard way to do so.

When I was in kindergarten, the teacher would lead the class to name off the months by pointing to a year calendar arranged on the wall in a horseshoe shape, starting with January in the bottom left, arcing through the summer months at the top and returing to December in the bottom right. Having been exposed to this particular arrangement so often at such an impressionable age, December and January are in my mind forever separated by gap, and it never fails to generate the feeling that those two months are more distant than any other adjacent months, and I'm sure it has an effect on my planning during that time.

It makes me wonder how it might feel to have learned the months arranged in a circle, on a line, or in a grid. Or to have learned European-style Monday-Sunday weeks, lunar months, or something exotic like months of 7 or 8 4-day weeks, or 10 144-minute hours per day. And of course the hacker in me wants to figure out what the optimal arrangement.

I've had similar realizations. I tend to visualize weeks and months linearly, but with no gaps. December and January are adjacent to each other in my mind, as are Sunday and Monday. (I also don't really consider the week to start on Sunday. If I designed a calendar for myself, weeks would be arranged in rows where Monday is the left-most cell, and Sunday is the right-most cell.)

I found myself in the other camp - but equally bewildered at first. Can I ask you if you would have drawn the same inference for "the deadline has been moved forward"? That phrase invokes panic in me - does it make you feel calmer? I've very briefly searched for that phrase on Google (there are plenty of hits for news stories) and each usage I've found so far is in the "becoming earlier" sense.

"The deadline has been moved forward" makes me think the same as you - it's now earlier.

Huh? How is two days earlier Friday?

It's not. Which is the point: different contexts make the same words mean different things for me.

I had exactly the opposite reaction, and almost as strongly.

Wouldn't saying "the meeting was moved back two days" have to mean Friday? I guess I'm pretty passive ...

That's the thing that surprised me: "the meeting was moved back two days" meant the same thing to me as "the meeting was moved forward two days." The only word that made me think the meeting was moved to Monday was "up."

My problem exactly. But I have always thought it was because English is not my native language. I guess the forward/back metaphor turns out simply not to be a good metaphor here.

Forward, back, down, up... why not just say earlier or later? :-)

Because of the verb. If we use "earlier" or "later," we need to use a verb related to time - such as "we rescheduled the meeting." That's cumbersome. By using a spatial metaphor, we can use the verb "move," which is simpler, but it introduces ambiguity for what direction means what time.

So we use it because it is simpler to say, not simpler to understand. Makes sense! :-)

If you think that's bad, you should really have a look at Grice's Paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Grice#Grice.27s_Paradox

I had to read this sentence ten times before I realized how it can be interpreted any different from the meeting is on Friday.

Absolutely agree. I just asked two random work mates about this and it made their head hurt to try and comprehend why anyone would think the meeting would fall on Monday. I can see from the comments here that some people do indeed think this way, but I've never knowingly met anyone who does and the idea seems completely foreign to me.

Meeting times are much more often moved farther into the future than closer to the present. Thus it's quite natural many people will see "forward [on the calendar]" and "back [further away from here and now]" as meaning the same thing in this context.

That is: it's easier to mentally toggle between calendar-orientation-metaphor and the receding-in-front-of-us-metaphor -- between which 'forward' and 'back' are not necessarily opposites -- than to toggle interpretation to the less-common situation where a meeting is moved earlier.

If you want to unambiguously declare a meeting is coming sooner, saying it's "moved up" currently works. In that case the traditional calendar- or even dayplanner- orientation predominates, whether it's moved up in days or hours.

(Online text may eventually change that: blogs and activity streams increasingly make down-the-past and up-the-future, with new items in some sense 'dropping in' from above the viewport. People who grow up on Twitter and its descendants may someday think of 'up' as further in the future.)

I really didn't know that there were two kinds of people one who thought they were moving thru time and the one who thought the time was just passing by. I cannot decide in which category I belong to.

It's almost certainly situational. Now, the question is which one applies to you more often.

I suspect their test group did not contain any members of the Aymara tribe, who metaphorically map time so that the past (which is known) is in front of them, and the future (which is unseeable) is behind them. See:

http://www.physorg.com/news69338070.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

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