Zumbardo on Time & Culture

Here is an excellent video by Philip Zimbardo that looks at "the geography of time", i.e. how perceptions of time change around the globe. He provides a number of generalizations that will drive some people crazy, but I accept them as broadly true. Like any characterization you need the caveat "your mileage may vary" and you need to recognize that broad statistical patterns say nothing about individual cases:



Zimbardo is famous for his Stanford prison experiment that showed how easily power corrupts most individuals. In 2007 he wrote an excellent book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, that delves into this and discusses how it applies to the US torture cases in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (and elsewhere, e.g. the secret CIA prisons!).

Now... before you go overboard with the above "revelations"... here's a bit of an antidote. Steven Pinker writes a NY Times op-ed to refute the idea that digital gizmos are destroying our minds:

New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.

So too with electronic technologies.

As always... the world is complex. Generalizations are useful tools for thinking about things. But all tools must be used with care. They can bite back. Worse, they aren't always useful in all situations. In the end, you have to use your own intelligence and make your own judgments while listening to others. The truth probably lies in the murky middle subject to all kinds of elaborate qualifications. So... enjoy the video, read the Pinker article, and puzzle it out for yourself.