Time perspective and volunteerism: The importance of focusing on the future

ABSTRACT

Because volunteerism is a planned activity that unfolds over time, people who more frequently focus on the future might also be more likely to initiate volunteerism and sustain it over time. Using longitudinal (Study 1) and experimental (Study 2) paradigms, we investigated whether time perspective, and in particular a person’s orientation toward the future, is related to volunteers’ beliefs and behavior. In Study 1, a person’s dispositional level of future time perspective was closely linked to volunteer beliefs and behavior. In Study 2, people who wrote about the future reported higher intentions to volunteer, and this was particularly true for infrequent volunteers and those with lower levels of dispositional future time perspective. Across two studies, we found evidence that future time perspective, whether a chronic disposition or a pattern of thought elicited by someone else, is linked to volunteer beliefs and behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• personality
• prosocial behaviour

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge and thank Arthur A. Stukas, Pierce Ekstrom, and Richie Lenne for providing feedback on earlier drafts of the article.

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation through a Graduate Research Fellowship to Alexander Maki.

Notes

1. Gender, age, and race were inconsistently related to time perspectives and volunteer outcomes across the two studies, so we do not consider them in the current analyses.

2. Open materials for this article can be accessed at https://osf.io/btksw/.

3. We ran follow-up models with the two present time perspectives as separate predictors, and no differences emerged in the significance of the associations between time perspectives and AmeriCorps outcomes.

4. This interaction remained significant or marginal when controlling for dispositional time perspectives.

5. This interaction remained significant when controlling for the other various time perspectives.

6. These patterns of findings largely held when considering the combined present time perspectives, with the only differences being that the combined present time perspective measure was a significant predictor of motivation but did not predict intentions, and that the future time perspective measure was also no longer a marginal predictor of intentions.

7. Research from the literature on construal level has explored the differential effects of manipulating thoughts about either the near or distant future. Our measures and manipulation were designed to simply measure and affect general thoughts concerning the future, but future research should explore teasing apart thoughts concerning these two segments of future time.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation through a Graduate Research Fellowship to Alexander Maki.

Notes on contributors

Alexander Maki

Alexander Maki is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment and the Vanderbilt Climate Change Research Network. His research interests include the study of theory-driven behavior change interventions in the proenvironmental, prosocial, and health domains, particularly as they relate to influencing individuals to both engage in a range of related behaviors (“behavior spillover”), and influencing the spread of behavior between individuals and groups. Patrick C. Dwyer is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research investigates social psychological processes involving motivation, emotion, and persuasion in order to understand when, why, and how people act in ways that benefit other individuals, groups, and society. Mark Snyder is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the McKnight Presidential Chair in Psychology and is the Director of the multi-disciplinary Center for the Study of the Individual and Society. His research interests include the motivational foundations of individual and collective action, with emphases on the psychology of self and identity, social interaction and interpersonal behavior, and volunteerism and other forms of prosocial action.

Patrick C. Dwyer

Alexander Maki is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment and the Vanderbilt Climate Change Research Network. His research interests include the study of theory-driven behavior change interventions in the proenvironmental, prosocial, and health domains, particularly as they relate to influencing individuals to both engage in a range of related behaviors (“behavior spillover”), and influencing the spread of behavior between individuals and groups. Patrick C. Dwyer is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research investigates social psychological processes involving motivation, emotion, and persuasion in order to understand when, why, and how people act in ways that benefit other individuals, groups, and society. Mark Snyder is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the McKnight Presidential Chair in Psychology and is the Director of the multi-disciplinary Center for the Study of the Individual and Society. His research interests include the motivational foundations of individual and collective action, with emphases on the psychology of self and identity, social interaction and interpersonal behavior, and volunteerism and other forms of prosocial action.

Mark Snyder

Alexander Maki is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Vanderbilt Institute for Energy and Environment and the Vanderbilt Climate Change Research Network. His research interests include the study of theory-driven behavior change interventions in the proenvironmental, prosocial, and health domains, particularly as they relate to influencing individuals to both engage in a range of related behaviors (“behavior spillover”), and influencing the spread of behavior between individuals and groups. Patrick C. Dwyer is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research investigates social psychological processes involving motivation, emotion, and persuasion in order to understand when, why, and how people act in ways that benefit other individuals, groups, and society. Mark Snyder is Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, where he holds the McKnight Presidential Chair in Psychology and is the Director of the multi-disciplinary Center for the Study of the Individual and Society. His research interests include the motivational foundations of individual and collective action, with emphases on the psychology of self and identity, social interaction and interpersonal behavior, and volunteerism and other forms of prosocial action.