Keeping Time

Abstract

This chapter focuses on social and cultural aspects of time. It examines the diversity of ways that people from different cultures measure, use and conceive time and some of the consequences of these different ways of thinking and behaving. It describes the author’s field experiments that have measured the pace of life in cities across the United States and around the world. These studies speak to the diversity of peoples’ time sense and the consequences of temporal norms for the physical, social and psychological well-being of the people who share these norms. The chapter pays tribute to Zimbardo’s work on time perspective. It argues that the two approaches—Zimbardo’s focus on the individual and the author’s focus on places—complement each other in the best tradition of social psychology.