Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 26, April 2019, Pages 103-105
Current Opinion in Psychology

The psychological consequence of thinking about time in terms of money

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2018.12.018Get rights and content

Highlights

  • •

    Putting a monetary value on one’s time can be psychologically powerful.

  • •

    Exposure to an hourly wage rate for time promotes an economic evaluation of time.

  • •

    Economic evaluation influences people’s decisions about how to spend their time.

  • •

    Economic evaluation affects time use in a variety of non-work domains.

  • •

    These decisions on time use appear to be largely independent from considerations of happiness.

Putting a monetary price on time can have powerful psychological consequences. I review the recent literature examining the psychological consequences of thinking about time in terms of money and the role organizational practices play in highlighting this connection in people’s lives. Over a decade of research shows payment practices highlighting the time/money connection have implications for how people make decisions to trade their free time to earn more money, volunteer their time, and socialize with their colleagues off the job. Given the proliferation of hourly payment as well as the larger gig economy, there is a clear need for future research to ascertain the consequences for individual’s happiness and the spillover between work and non-work spheres.

Section snippets

Trading time for money

A focus on the economic returns of time has been observed in how hourly workers make explicit tradeoffs between giving up free time to earn more money. Controlling for a wide set of covariates in a cross-sectional survey of the US population, DeVoe and Pfeffer [3] observed that hourly workers compared to their non-hourly counterparts expressed a greater willingness to give up more of their free time to earn more money. This finding was replicated using data from seven waves of a longitudinal

Volunteerism

Volunteering one’s time is a form of work that lacks direct compensation. Such an activity is difficult to justify undertaking when thinking about one’s time in terms of money and economically evaluating how to spend time. Indeed, time use analyses in a nationally representative survey of the U.S. revealed that hourly workers were less likely to volunteer their time and volunteered less time than their non-hourly counterparts [8••]. Similarly, non-hourly workers randomly assigned to calculate

Socializing off the job

While an economic evaluation of time might appear to segment work and personal life along the dimension of paid time, a focus on the economic returns of time-use can potentially spill over into decisions where there is a prospect of high remuneration, such as professional networking. Indeed, socializing with colleagues outside of work is an activity that integrates work and personal life, and the key dimension regarding economic evaluation is whether the activity holds the prospect of high

Future directions

When a society has a particular way of viewing time, such views are often codified in practices that reinforce that view of time through repeated exposure to those very same practices [15, 16, 17]. Paying hourly is one such practice. Over the past half century, the proportion of workers paid by the hour has remained the same or increased every year in both the U.S. [14••,18] and Canada [19]. More recently during this period, the gig economic—which further facilitates the selling of time a

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

References (20)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.
View full text
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.