The effects of language on patience: an experimental replication study of the linguistic-savings hypothesis in Austria

The famous linguistic-savings hypothesis states that languages that grammatically separate the future from the present (like English) causally induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future using present tense (like German or Chinese). Chen et al., European Economic Review 120 (2019) experimentally investigate the effect of using future-oriented language on incentivized intertemporal choices and find no support for the hypothesis. We replicate Chen et al., European Economic Review 120 (2019)’s study in the German-speaking context. In our experiment with 332 subjects, we randomly refer to future payments using present or future tense and find no causal effect of language on intertemporal choice. Given the importance of replications for confidence in scientific findings, our results provide corroborating evidence that the linguistic-savings hypothesis is not empirically tenable. Eventually, the results provide a methodological contribution to the conduct of experiments.