New experimental evidence of the effect of language on economic decisions

This is a guest post by Cole Robertson. Readers of this blog are likely to be familiar with controversy surrounding Keith Chen’s (2013) findings suggesting that the way a language deals with the future tense affects speakers’ economic decisions. A new study by a group of Austrian and German economists has recently added experimental evidence … Continue reading “New experimental evidence of the effect of language on economic decisions”

Future tense and saving money: Small number bias

Last week saw the release of the latest Roberts & Winters collaboration (with guest star Keith Chen). The paper, Future Tense and Economic Decisions: Controlling for Cultural Evolution, builds upon Chen’s previous work by controlling for historical relationships between cultures. As Sean pointed out in his excellent overview, the analysis was extremely complicated, taking over two … Continue reading “Future tense and saving money: Small number bias”

Future tense and saving money: no correlation when controlling for cultural evolution

This week our paper on future tense and saving money is published (Roberts, Winters & Chen, 2015).  In this paper we test a previous claim by Keith Chen about whether the language people speak influences their economic decisions (see Chen’s TED talk here or paper).  We find that at least part of the previous study’s … Continue reading “Future tense and saving money: no correlation when controlling for cultural evolution”

Language, economic behaviour, a fancy video and some marshmallows

Most of you are probably now familiar with the following video about Keith Chen’s work on The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Given this blog’s link with Chen’s study (see Sean’s RT posts here and here), and that Sean and I recently had our own paper published on the topic of these correlational studies, I … Continue reading “Language, economic behaviour, a fancy video and some marshmallows”

Gender, language and economic power: another spurious correlation?

A paper from the Berkeley economic history laboratory published online last week finds a correlation between speaking a language with grammatical gender distinctions and the economic empowerment of women.  Gay, Santacreu-Vasut and Shoham (2013) find that women in countries with languages that make gender distinctions are less likely to participate in the labour market or … Continue reading “Gender, language and economic power: another spurious correlation?”

Whorfian economics reconsidered: Residuals and Causal Graphs

Yesterday I posted an analysis of some work by Prof. Keith Chen on the link between future tense marking and economic decisions.  Prof. Chen made some suggestions about changes to the analysis, some of which I’ve carried out here.  The new results below indicate that the link between future tense and the propensity to save … Continue reading “Whorfian economics reconsidered: Residuals and Causal Graphs”

Whorfian economics reconsidered: Why future tense?

Update: I have carried out some more analyses that paint a different picture to the one presented below.  Oops! A recently accepted paper by Keith Chen has been getting a lot of press coverage. Chen has discovered a close link between the properties of the language people speak and their economic decisions. People who speak … Continue reading “Whorfian economics reconsidered: Why future tense?”

Uncovering spurious correlations between language and culture

James and I have a new paper out in PLOS ONE where we demonstrate a whole host of unexpected correlations between cultural features. These include acacia trees and linguistic tone, morphology and siestas, and traffic accidents and linguistic diversity. We hope it will be a touchstone for discussing the problems with analysing cross-cultural statistics, and … Continue reading “Uncovering spurious correlations between language and culture”