A History of Water Scarcity Shapes How People Plan for the Future

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Narrator: Some cultures encourage indulgence and living in the moment. Other cultures embrace self-control or long-term thinking in exchange for a reward later in life. Where do these cultural dispositions come from? Is long-term orientation a product of the current political or economic environment? Or are these approaches rooted in a deeper history? Chicago Booth’s Thomas Talhelm and his co-author tried to answer that question. They started with two cities in Iran, Shiraz, whose residents are commonly perceived to be indulgent and enjoy life, and Yazd, whose citizens are known for working hard and denying instant gratification.

Thomas Talhelm: So first, we wanted to know whether the differences between these two places were actually real, or these just sort of popular conceptions or stereotypes about these two places. And second, we wanted to know whether these two places could teach us something about the origin of cultural differences more generally. And so the thing about Shiraz, the place with the wine, is that it has enough water and enough rainfall to support agriculture. And that’s where Shiraz, the wine comes from. The place Yazd, that’s a drier place. Agriculture’s more difficult. Life in general is sort of more difficult because it’s so dry. And that’s also the place where people are known for sort of delaying gratification and thinking about the future. We thought of these two places as a little bit like a natural experiment in that these are places within the same country. They have, you know, fairly similar temperatures and latitudes and religion and ethnic groups and, you know, national government and all this. So it’s a bit of a natural experiment to compare these two places. But of course, two places are never gonna be totally identical.

Narrator: The researchers conducted two studies, the first surveyed college students, asking them about their views on long-term thinking versus self-indulgence. The second study posted two job openings for three different types of positions. One of the ads emphasized job stability with a well-established company. The other emphasized an exciting workplace with a startup. The findings suggest that water scarce cultures tended towards long-term orientations, while water abundant cultures towards living in the present. The researchers looked at whether water was important in other parts of the world by looking at data on long-term orientation attitudes from the World Values Survey. They tested whether people’s values related to the availability of fresh water historically.

Thomas Talhelm: When we were comparing countries around the world, we looked at factors like economic development, education differences between countries, things like urbanization and religion and other sorts of factors. And yet we found that, you know, when people respond to questions that are measuring people’s values around the world, like focusing on the present versus thinking about the long-term, countries that had a history of water scarcity tended to think more about the long-term and delay gratification. Whereas countries that had a history of more water abundance, they tended to focus more on the present and enjoy life. And our explanation for that is that, you know, water is a really important resource, right? If water is scarce in the environment, we need to preserve and sort of think of the future. But if water, this very scarce and important resource, if it’s actually abundant in our environment, then we can be a little bit more relaxed and sort of enjoy the present.

Narrator: If long-term thinking means people are investing in the future, are those societies better off in the long run? Do their economies grow more?

Thomas Talhelm: So what we found is that, you know, independent from economic development, you can find an influence of the sort of historical scarcity of water on people’s value of the long-term. So we think that those two are separable, but in certain instances, you know, these all can sort of influence each other, right? Our long-term thinking can influence our economic development. So one question that came up during this research is should we think about water in the same way that we think about money, right? Like is the effect of wealth and sort of poverty and scarcity, is that the same as these effects of like having water versus not having water? And actually what the research shows is that the psychological effects of water scarcity versus poverty seem to be really different. So when psychologists have looked at the effects of poverty, what they found is that that tends to focus people on the present. So people who lack money, who lack sort of financial resources tend to think about the here and now. But what we were finding in our studies is that in cultures that lack water, they’re thinking of not about the here and now, but they’re thinking about the long-term. And so there seems to be something different about money and water. One potential explanation is that our minds were sort of evolved over a long period of time to think sort of differently about water, whereas money is a sort of modern human invention. So maybe our brains are sort of tuned to money differently from how we’re tuned to something so critical for basic life like water.

Narrator: In an additional study, the researchers wanted to know if the thought of water scarcity could change people’s preexisting dispositions towards long-term thinking or living in the present. They gave participants articles about research on climate change. Some people saw an article that predicted water scarcity, others saw an article predicting that climate change would increase rainfall and make water more available.

Thomas Talhelm: What we found is that when we told people about a future with more water scarcity and more droughts, that made them think about the long-term and sort of deny sort of the value of the present and sort of emphasize saving for the future. We told other people about a world where climate change would paradoxically make water more available in different places. And when we told people that, then people said, “Oh, well we can focus on the present and live more in the moment.” Now, probably the truth is that climate change is gonna make water more scarce around the world. So the fact that our natural reaction to water scarcity seems to be to think more about the long-term, perhaps that’s a glimmer of hope in the sort of bleak future of climate change because I think climate change is gonna require of us more long-term thinking. And so it’s at least slightly hopeful that water scarcity seems to trigger or elicit long-term thinking in people sort of naturally.