Oliver Sng—a research fellow at the University of Michigan—and colleagues at Arizona State University compared country and state population-density figures against data on residents’ willingness to invest in education, save for retirement, and otherwise plan for the future. Their analysis revealed that people in more-populated areas showed a significantly stronger preference for activities with a long-term payoff. The team’s conclusion: Crowded places make people think more about the future.
Sng: Based on these findings and on follow-up experiments designed to test causation, I do believe there’s a link between population density and what biologists refer to as “life-history strategy.” The general idea is that species and organisms either live “fast”—focusing on the present, reproducing early, bearing lots of offspring, and not investing as much in each child or in themselves—or “slow,” focusing on the future, self-development, longer-term relationships, and fewer kids. Humans pursue a slower life-history strategy than other animals do, but there is variation among us, and while some of that may be genetic, we’ve also evolved to respond to our environment. In crowded places, where there’s arguably greater competition for resources, we might feel we need to invest more in ourselves and our kids to succeed. That’s the hypothesis my coauthors, Steven Neuberg, Michael Varnum, and Douglas Kenrick, and I wanted to test.
HBR: And it proved correct?
Sng: Yes. In more- densely-populated countries, we saw less sexual promiscuity, lower fertility rates, higher preschool enrollment, and a greater societal emphasis on planning for the future versus solving today’s problems. In more-densely-populated U.S. states, people married later, had fewer children, and were more likely to attain a bachelor’s degree and participate in retirement savings plans. All these measures of future orientation build on one another, but population density seems to play a foundational role. These findings held up even when we controlled for population size, economic prosperity, and urbanization.
Subjects who heard audio clips of crowds were more apt to choose delayed rewards.
HBR: Couldn’t it just be that forward-thinking people prefer more-populated areas?
SNG: That’s why we did the experimental studies. In the first one, we asked half our participants—people recruited online from all over the United States—to read a fictitious New York Times article about how the U.S. population was growing at an unprecedented rate. We then had them answer questions designed to gauge their future orientation, such as “Would you want to get $100 tomorrow or $150 in 90 days?” The other half, our control group, read no article but took the same survey. We found that people given the article showed a greater preference for the delayed but larger rewards. Though small, the effect was significant. By artificially introducing the idea of high density, we seem to have pushed people to think more about the long term.