Phillip Zimbardo is an excellent scholar who has done a lot of fascinating work. Of course, he is most well known for the Stanford Prison Experiment (the second Google result when you search “experiment”), but he has other interests as well. Few people know that Zimbardo is one of the leading scholars in the field of studying how people understand time.
Zimbardo and John Boyd authored The Time Paradox, and I am about halfway through it right now. So far, it is excellent. I got it for a really good price at a Barnes and Noble a few months ago, but I just now started reading it; I should have started sooner.
One cool thing about reading psychology books is that they are usually interactive. Psychologists are eager to involve their readers in the experiments and they usually engage readers, asking them to answer surveys and see how they fit in to the experimental studies.
The authors have developed the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory that rates how people relate to time on a variety of scales. The scales are: past-negative, present-hedonistic, future, past-positive, and present-fatalistic. Without too much explanation, you should be able to deduce what these labels mean and you should be able to see that some of them can coexist with others (past-negative and present-fatalistic go well together, for instance).
The ZTPI results aren’t purely academic, either. The authors apply their results to numerous real life scenarios. for instance, future-oriented individuals tend to succeed at life and past-negative individuals are more prone to believe fabricated bad memories. Time perspective affects decision-making, planning, and interpretation of events. It is one of the most core aspects of any person.
The authors also discuss some cultural aspects to time perspective, comparing the American/European view of time to the Latin American view of time. That is really interesting, but that is as far as I have gone in the book so far. I’ll be back with more thoughts later, perhaps. It is a great book so far, especially for getting it so cheap!
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