Laureiro-Martinez , Trujillo, and Unda (2017) recently published a review of the literature on age related differences on time perspective which is very pertinent to any evaluation of Zimbardo and Boyd’s seminal paper. There is a good case that time perspectives will change as we grow older for two quite simple reasons. Our goals change with age and knowledge becomes less important as social and emotional goals come very much into prominence 36 in one’s life as we grow older. But we bring into it a wealth of life experience to better navigate everyday life. Consequently our time perspectives should change but Zimbardo and Boyd (1999, p. 19) claimed they were dispositional characteristics and as such relatively stable. Not only that but they also suggest that, because time perspective is such a basic process then this property of you as an individual affects a host of other activities including achievement, goal setting, risk taking, sensation seeking, addiction, rumination, and guilt (Zimbardo & Boyd, 1999, p. 19). I may be labouring the point but if we are going to take time perspective as an important feature of the psychology of the consumer , and some of the behaviours mentioned by the authors in the previous sentence are related to consumption , then whether one’s profile of time perception changes over the lifespan or remains a stubbornly enduring embedded feature of one’s personality will have important marketing and consumer-related implications. For example, does one segment a market on the basis of age, or personality characteristics?
Laureiro-Martinez et al. come into their own when they use Zimbardo and Boyd (1999)’s five separate factors to create hypotheses relating age to these different aspects of time perspective. Let’s start with the past. There are two aspects of looking back to the past and thinking about what happened. You can regret it or wax nostalgically over it. Most people I’m sure can do both but some of us have many regrets and no affection whereas others can only see those days that are gone through rose-tinted spectacles. As we grow older the evidence cited by Laureiro-Martinez et al. suggests that there is a shift from regret to nostalgia that is a consequence of both a past-positive orientation increasing with age and the past-negative orientation decreasing. The argument here is interesting but it uses some powerful psychological concepts that need explaining. The first fact to consider is that the older you get the more experience you have accumulated. Next, some of the experience you’ve undergone is positive—you have been rewarded for your efforts at school or at work or your group have accepted you because your clothes and tastes are cool. But some things you have done have ended up in negative feelings; social rejection and ridicule because you don’t wear the right stuff or a relationship that has traumatised you and made you feel small. There are two things that will often happen. One is that the self will be threatened and your sense of self-efficacy or level of self-esteem will be challenged. You think you can’t do that, you’re not up to it, there are too many obstacles in the way (low self-efficacy) . Or you feel unworthy, insignificant and less valued (low self-esteem) . In both cases your ability and skill to operate as an autonomous agent, making decisions and carrying them out is affected. That is threatening to you and ever since Freud talked about repression we have recognised that if the self is challenged then various self-protective processes occur. One of these is selective forgetting where self-threatening events tend to be recalled less than those that are memorable not just because they stood out dramatically from the flow of everyday life but because they were rewarding to you as a person. Because older people have been around longer than the younger ones, they have had more time and a wealth of experience to accumulate pleasant, positive memories and forget the painful and ego-threatening ones.
But as well as that, age affects our present orientation—both kinds. Present-hedonistic , living for the moment and enjoying pleasure and the present-fatalistic orientation, a passive stoical acceptance of your lot both becomes less attractive now than when we were young. Why? I’ll use this opportunity to introduce a concept that you will find useful. It’s known as locus of control and it was first mentioned in 1966 in a classic paper by Rotter. It’s the extent to which you believe that you can control events and outcomes in your own life. Sometimes you think you failed the exam because the exam setter set trick questions but on other occasions you admit that you failed because you hadn’t revised enough. If you strongly believe that events in your life are a consequence of your own actions you are have an internal locus of control but if you reckon that things that happen to you in your life are mainly a result of outside forces such as other people, fate, or just chance acting on you then you have an external locus of control . It’s on a spectrum and many people are in between. Although this construct is supposed to identify individual people many religious belief systems package it up along with other beliefs about moral conduct and ritual actions. We encounter fate and the will of God in the belief systems of those who adhere to religious faith. Laureiro-Martinez et al. (2017) argue that as people grow older they will increasingly develop control over their lives and acquire a stronger internal locus of control . 37 Consequently the stoical, fatalistic attitudes to life as represented in a present-fatalistic orientation and the devil-may-care hedonistic approach in present-hedonistic get less and less frequent as we get older.
Rutt and Löckenhoff (2016) 38 were also interested in mental representations of time but they took a broader perspective than Zimbardo and Boyd (1999). They identified three aspects of time perception. ‘Global time horizons ’ is how people see themselves on the continuum between birth and death . ‘General future-directed thought ’ is similar to the Zimbardo and Boyd version. Then there is what they call ‘Episodic future thought ’ which is what they expect to happen in the future and when they guess it will happen. In addition they assessed and put into the analysis various characteristics of the participants they thought might also affect time perception such as their age (they used a lifespan sample aged 21–89 years), and measures of their personality, emotion and cognition. Of course with such as complex and varied set of measures there would be no simple result but the one that stands out is that there were changes with age but the different mental representations of time show distinct age patterns that are associated with the other measures.
Ersner-Hershfield , Mikels, Sullivan, and Carstensen (2008) were interested in mixed emotions , that combination of contrasts in feeling that increase in occurrence as you grow older. Their theory is fairly straightforward: As you grow older your time becomes more and more finite, with increases in intimations of mortality making us aware of that. The emotions of people as they grow older tend to drift toward the positive and they can be more complex as well, including mixed emotions as in pleasure with your grandchildren ‘tinged with sadness’. 39 There is a tendency in older people to focus on the present and the consequence of that is a search for more positive emotions and less of the negative (op. cit., p. 159). The authors were interested in one particular emotion that would be of relevance to older people. It’s best described as ‘poignancy ’ and is a mixed emotion of happiness and sadness. From their empirical research they conclude that it can be found in older people with a sense of limited time who experience the loss of something meaningful. They are somewhat short on examples so I would consider retirement as an example, or moving from a home with attachments and memories to another place. Maybe attending funerals of close friends or relatives or losing your own partner fit the bill too. There are consumption and marketing issues surrounding these events if you are in the position of providing a service that needs to be delivered with sensitivity. There is another form of loss however and that is nostalgia where one looks back and although this will almost certainly occur in most of us when we attain old age simply because there is such a rich backlog of experience from that vantage point, it can be found in people of all ages.
Wildschut , Sedikides , Arndt , and Routledge (2006) provided a comprehensive account of the psychology of nostalgia. Originally classified as a psychological illness it has gradually shifted in meaning to now
apply to a rather wistful recollection of the past with elements of sadness and regret. Using analyses of accounts of narratives from respondents they found that a nostalgic narrative was common. Often the self was featured as the topic participating in an important, central role interacting with important others. The setting might be a momentous event like birth or death . Affect i.e. emotional tone was often positive. Although the stories often were of disappointments and losses most of them were redeemed by subsequent triumphs over adversity. So that’s nostalgia. But what does it do relative to other parts of your psychology? It’s usually classified as a positive emotion like love, pride and joy and also it generates positive affect. The authors also suggest that thinking nostalgically has distinct advantages as it can affirm parts of you that you value. Remembering and actively restoring the events of the past where you played a role is good for you and even might help your manage the fear of death (see Chapter 12, section on “Terror Management Theory”) (Routledge , Arndt, Sedikides , & Wildschut, 2008).
The other way of bridging the gap is by using stepping stones—events that happen not to everyone but that occur and can change your circumstances. Sometimes they happen to you because you anticipate them, seek them out and think this is what is expected of you because they are part of your socialisation in your culture in the twenty-first century. Others are unanticipated events that happen to you in life. You might attribute them to good or bad fortune, or see them as part of your status and/or role in society or events that you bring upon yourself because you worked for them and deserve them. All of these will affect your patterns of consumer behaviour and again it is not possible to do anything more than mention them briefly.
Stuff Happens
This terse phrase suggests that events in our lives can happen randomly and bring misfortune as well as the good variety. C’est la vie. Or what about ‘Events dear boy, events’. Most readers under 60 will not recognise this phrase which is attributed to one of Britain’s twentieth century prime ministers called Harold Macmillan and suggests that politicians usually fail because of a particular cocktail of circumstances when the world seems to be ganging up against them, and there’s not much you can do about that. So let’s start with…
Midlife Crisis
The term midlife crisis is often used in everyday English but looking at the literature I would suggest that the response should be ‘Crisis? What crisis?’ Lachman (2004) for example in her comprehensive review of development in midlife dismisses it in less than a page. Major life events such as illness or divorce that could precipitate a sense of crisis can occur then but they could at any time of adult life and these turning points are not unique to mid-life. Indeed Robbins and Wilner (2001) have created a ‘Quarterlife crisis’ that kicks in in one’s twenties into early thirties which might appeal to many readers of that age who have the interest and wherewithal to buy books with that sort of title. We’ll look at that in the next section. However to take it more seriously we should ask if there any characteristics that are common to both. Certainly the midlife period could be seen as a time when one feels pulled in two directions, holding on to one’s youth and becoming older and more respectable and the role confusion that emerges is expressed in different ways. For example how to behave in front of one’s children who are now themselves quite likely to be adult themselves. This role confusion then is a likely candidate for driving identity issues associated with it and mistakes can be made when adults want to be seen as youthful as their children but they are a generation away from them. The role switching that occurs in areas like tastes in clothes, music and consumption in general causes confusion in both child and parent who might want to be seen in these roles in one context but not in another. There are sites where the role confusion can become acute, like ‘the family holiday’ or various family based occasions such as weddings, consumer driven festivals such as Christmas , and other family get-togethers. Or search using the term ‘dad dancing’.
Quarter Life Crisis
For many twenty-somethings role confusion starts with a prolonged period of staying at home . I can’t say whether this is found in different countries across the world as that would require a systematic review of this time of life but it is recognised in the UK in the latter part of the second decade of this century that, for economic and social reasons there are many children staying at home until their late 20s who, if they could get a job and afford a place to live away from home, would want to do so. A similar pattern of role confusion emerges where the child/adult role of the daughter or son needs to be defined carefully. In addition, if the ‘adult child’ in the family wants to form a new home and have children, there are a variety of different roles available based on cultural recognition of both different and same gender roles coupled with a growing fluidity of traditional binary sexual identity. 40 In some countries many of these possible arrangements are recognised in law and by some religions too. In many of these arrangements having children is seen as an optional extra and children can be incorporated into the family at any time. In addition, although a man can physically contribute to the process of conception until late in life, a woman is not in that position and by 40 years of age a woman only has a 5% chance of becoming pregnant in any month. All these choices are now available and although freedom of individual choice is an admirable goal for a society to achieve, it does have a rhetorical edge to it. Freedom of choice suggests that there should also be freedom to cancel the arrangement and demand your money back if things don’t work. All of these contribute to the anxieties of young men and particularly young women at this time of life.
Divorce
Some basic statistics first; England and Wales unless otherwise stated. Divorce numbers declined again in 2015 by 9.1% since 2014 and that’s an annual contribution to a decline of 34% since a peak in 2003. Why? It’s likely that living together is a contributory factor to this reduction in the percentage of marriages ending in divorce as risky relationships are picked up earlier by the partners and can be terminated before the contract of marriage in entered into. Also if you marry young then there’s a higher risk of divorcing anyway (Office for National Statistics GB, 2015). Clayton , Nagurney, and Smith (2013) argued that Facebook use can threaten marriages and interpersonal relationships in general because of the temptation to contact previous partners and share with people, both of which can challenge the exclusivity of marriage. The main question that is frequently asked about divorce and its effects is concerned with the children of the marriage and how a splintering of the family is felt by the participants. Prevoo and ter Weel (2015) in a sophisticated and sound study interrogated an extensive longitudinal 41 UK data base to examine how family disruption affected the children. They found that parental divorce had the largest negative effect on a child’s personality development and one telling finding was that, if you compare the event of death of one of the parents with divorce then it is divorce that seems to have the most disruptive effect on the child’s personality development (op. cit., p. 84). Divorce however extends beyond the family. In a fascinating study, McDermott , Fowler, and Christakis (2013) using a unique database which was first established in the USA in 1948 were able to explore social networks using over 10,000 records. And yes, divorce is infectious. It can spread within friends and people who are divorced are more likely to remarry other divorcees. The authors argue that divorce should be treated as a collective phenomenon where processes such as social influence (friends encouraging or inhibiting divorce in others) and homophily (like attracts like so that people with the same divorce status choose one another as friends) are operating.
There is not much research relating to consumer psychology and divorce but a notable exception is Baker , Mathur, Choong, Moschis, and Rigdon (2013). These authors were interested in compulsive buying and its relationship to ‘disruptive family events’ within a life course framework and that would include divorce. Compulsive buying is a pattern of behaviour with two main possible explanations. First, you ha
ve learnt to be an impulsive person because it’s been a rewarding activity in the past. Socialisation for impulsivity can come from various sources. Maybe your family were impulsive in their behaviours and saw doing things on the spur of the moment or gaining instant gratification as what life’s all about. Perhaps your best friends or even advertising conveyed the message ‘come on—just do it’ as the mantra for being a cool guy as careful people are boring people. The other explanation is to locate compulsive buying as a disorder called obsessive-compulsive behaviour where you feel impelled to do something whether it’s drinking alcohol, taking other drugs, smoking, repetitive sexual behaviour or maybe just rituals like checking all the locks several times on the doors at night. The root cause of many of these compulsive behaviours is anxiety which is a fear of fear. Of course the truth as in most things lies in between but academic debate tends to polarise issues in order to clarify them and maybe advance our understanding in that way. A life course approach provides us with a long term process oriented view of the issue of compulsive buying where sociocultural influences as well as characteristics of the level of the individual need to be considered as well as the role of various potentially disruptive events in one’s life.
Job Related Crises
There are various events relating to work that can have an effect on you. Holmes and Rahe (1967) constructed a rating scale to measure stress using 43 events in life and ranked them using a population of over 5000. It is still used, with a few items suitably sanitised to suit the mores of the twenty-first century. Several of these items dealt with work and they were (rank order as stressor in brackets): Fired at work (8); Retirement (10); Business readjustment (15); Change to different line of work (18); Change in responsibilities at work (22); Wife 42 begin or stop work (26); Trouble with boss (30); Change in work hours or conditions (31). In addition several items dealt with the family’s financial situation and work is by far the biggest contributor to that, even though many families now will have two breadwinners and thus spread the risk of unemployment . A quick content analysis of these occupational stressors would suggest that the main stress would come from ‘my job gone’ either through sacking or retiring or, to a lesser extent ‘some disruption to work routines’. The ideal state is full employment and a steady flow of predictable work.
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