How culture impacts time and the way we communicate

Culture impacts our daily lives and how we communicate, whether we notice it or not. Culture is a part of our identity, all of our identities. There are so many different aspects of culture, including values, norms, beliefs, language, religion, and so much more. One aspect of culture, though, that impacts how we communicate is time.

Time is a huge factor in all of our lives, it impacts how we communicate because it is all around us. Time is what drives our lives; time is in everything we do. It’s actually engraved into our lives in so many different ways that, unless we actually stop to think about it, we don’t even notice. Once we understand that, we have to realize that there are so many different aspects of time that continue to impact our lives; one of them being culture.

Levine, West, and Reis (1980) studied this phenomenon in Brazilian culture, noticing that people in Brazil view time very differently than the researchers themselves. There was more leisure and flexibility with time; there was no sense of rushing or a need to be punctual. Levine noticed that their walking pace, accuracy of clocks, lateness, and punctuality were very different compared to Americans. When it comes to time, Brazilians had a slower pace of life.

This can also be looked at in terms of clock time versus event time. When people are on clock time, they typically run their lives through schedules and have heavy emphasis on punctuality and being on time. When people are on event time, they typically run their lives around events, noting that events run the course of their lives; events have natural start and end times and there’s no heavy emphasis on punctuality or being on time.

Time is an aspect of culture that we don’t really think about unless faced head on with that challenge. Bernad (2002) tells a story about how the president of the Philippines was being honored by a university in America; the university set up a ceremony that everyone was excited for. The ceremony was scheduled to start at 2PM, but the president didn’t show up until about 4PM to a, now empty, auditorium and a very small ceremony, which was not intended to be that way. This made a lot of people angry and confused.

It made people view the president as disrespectful of other peoples’ time. However, that’s not how the president viewed it. There was an obvious cultural difference; the president was on event time, whereas this university runs on clock time. This is just one example of how cultures’ views of time have impacts in how we communicate and how we view people based on their orientation towards time.

In another study, White, Valk, and Dialmy (2011), studied the meaning of “on time” in Estonia, Morocco, and the United States, looking specifically at university students. Researchers studied a total of 301 university students and used the term “on time window” to measure punctuality. There were noticeable differences across cultures and what they each coined as late- Moroccan students had larger mean scores, followed by Estonian students, then American students, when it came to what they considered late to be, in terms of minutes. In both Moroccan and Estonian culture, they were more relaxed with punctuality, compared to American culture. However, a big finding was that punctuality depends on the event. Across cultures, “lateness” scored a little higher when it came to social gatherings.

When it comes to time and culture, it is apparent that different cultures view times very differently. We all understand that cultures have different views on various things, but sometimes, we don’t realize that time is a part of culture. We cannot assume that people are not respecting our time if our views are different. Time is a huge part of culture and we all know and understand that we should be respectful of each others’ cultures. We should understand that culture has so many different aspects, and since time is so engraved in our lives, we need to consider it a bigger part of our culture so that we can understand each other better.

xoxo,
kaels
live life with love to avoid regret<3

REFERENCES:

Bernad, M.A. (2002). Filipino time. A Journal of Ideas and Culture, 5(3), 55-61.

Levine, R.V., West, L.J., & Reis, H.T. (1980). Perceptions of time and punctuality in the United
States and Brazil. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38(4), 541-550.

White, L.T., Valk, R., & Dialmy, A. (2011). What is the meaning of “on time”? the sociocultural
nature of punctuality. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 42(3), 482–493.

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