Taking Time Seriously: A Theory of Socioemotional Selectivity

Scholars of theoretical physics, anthropology, astronomy, and philosophy have written extensively about people’s perception of time; in contrast, psychologists have remained conspicuously silent on the topic. This is not to say that tacit conceptions of time have been absent in social science. On the contrary, psychologists have studied the influence of historical periods on human development (Elder & Clipp, 1994; Elder, Pavalko, & Hastings, 1991), life-stage effects on values and attitudes (Sears, 1981), cultural differences in the social norms pertaining to time (Jones, 1988), and individual differences in time orientation (Gonzalez & Zimbardo, 1985). To the extent that chronological age is an index of the passage of time, the entire subdiscipline of developmental psychology is inherently organized around this concept. Yet, if one really takes time seriously and acknowledges that time provides the structure from which people plan and implement all shortand long-term goals, the implications for psychology are far-reaching and have been largely ignored (Birren & Cunningham, 1985).