[LUM#10] Are you polychronic or monochronic?
Feeling like you'll never see the end of it, or that you don't have enough hours in the day? Tendency to disperse or, on the contrary, to focus? Marketing researcher Andréa Gourmelen deciphers the influence of our relationship with time on our daily behavior.
Today, the relationship with time is a central variable," explains Andréa Gourmelen, researcher at the Montpellier Management Research Laboratory(MRM). There was a time when we were told to go fast. Now, with the slow life trend, we're told to slow down, but no one invites us to follow our own pace". An individual rhythm that the researcher does not hesitate to compare "to a personality trait, a subjective relationship that each individual has with time".
A personality trait
Andréa Gourmelen describes two typical personality profiles: the polychronic and the monochronic. "The first likes to do a thousand things at once, and is very efficient that way. The second will prefer to finish one thing before starting the next. There's no one method that's better than another, you just have to follow the one that suits you best.
Except that at a time when magazines, blogs and other coaches are all giving us their little tips on how to manage our time better, it's not so easy to decipher and respect our innermost nature. To carry out their studies and establish our profiles, marketers work with scales. Items are proposed to respondents, who are asked to answer according to their degree of support. "On a scale of 1, when they agree completely, to 5 when they disagree completely. For example: I prefer to work on several projects every day, rather than finish one and move on to the next", explains the researcher.
At the end of the test, the number of points accumulated points to one or other profile. " The idea is to define a general personality trait according to its degree of polychronicity.
Time and consumption
It's a relationship with time that modern society more readily questions in terms of task planning or productivity, but which ultimately conditions a large part of our behavior and modes of action, as the researcher explains: "Our relationship with time is individual, like a personality trait, but it's also multifaceted. It influences the way we shop, do sport, eat and use digital applications.
These are just some of the situations and approaches in which the "time variable" can prove relevant or revealing, and which have aroused the interest of marketing researchers for over 25 years. " There is an abundance of literature on this subject in our discipline", explains Andréa Gourmelen. She and her colleague Jeanne Lallement, from the University of La Rochelle, wanted to make this literature more accessible by publishing in the journal Research et applications en Marketing " a synthesis of 198 articles studying the influence of this variable on our consumption behavior". What a good time!
Read also:
Slow down...or find your rhythm?, 2018, in The Conversation
The time that remains
How does the perception of time left to live influence the voluntary involvement of retired people? It was with this original approach that Andréa Gourmelen, then a PhD student, began to introduce the time variable into her research. A social marketing study aimed at improving the quality of volunteering in associations. "We often think, wrongly, that retired people volunteer because they have a lot of time to give when, on the contrary, they often feel they lack time on a daily basis."
Three years and some 700 questionnaires later, she has highlighted the relationship between volunteering and what she describes as "older people's relationship to the time remaining to them". A relationship with time and its acceleration, again perceived in a highly individual and subjective way. "For some, the awareness of death will plunge them into regret and nostalgia for all the things they haven't done, while for others it will boost them to do lots of things, because they feel they don't have much time left and want to make the most of it. It's all very personal," concludes the researcher.
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