Personal Time Zone: How Do You Relate to 'Time'?

I found a sort of Myers-Briggs test that analyzes your perceptions of time.  It is an instrument that finds what time zone your psyche is dominated by: Past, Present, Future.  The theory is robust and has seven categories in all.  You may know the author, Philip Zimbardo, as the past president of the American Psychology Association and narrator of the PBS series Discovering Psychology.

Zimbardo  has done demographics studies that use this categorization tool to evaluate different populations.  For example, while nothing is absolute, being raised in poverty is correlated with producing a person who is fatalisitic and present-oriented toward hedonism.  Further, Zimbardo says the test scores are predictors of future personal success, citing a correlation between people who are future focused and how far they go in life. 

One part of his research may already be familiar to you: the marshmallow experiment, where 4 year olds are left alone in a room and told that if they stay out of the treats bowl, they'll get more treats after the researcher returns.  Zimbardo gives dramatic longitudinal data for the kids from that study.

You can take the test for free.

I always hope that these tests will give a clear score, not some middling result, and so I was satisfied that at least two of my scores were in the outer fifth of the data collected so far by the site.  Here are my results:

 

The red dots on the graph are Zimbardo's recommended levels.  The middle stripe, marked 50%, is the list of average scores (i.e. the average for all people who have taken the test is a score of 3.0 3.7, 2.4, 3.4, 3.5, 3.3 in the six categories).

If you take the test, let me know how it comes out!

(I discovered the Time Paradox Test while listening to the largely excellent podcasts which archive current presenters from meetings of the New York Academy of Science.)

UPDATE: I added my scores to the graph with an E mark.

Comments

[Noah]

Another "time-based" personality system is www.mindtime.com

[Eric Silver]

My score was identical to yours

[Nathan]

A pretty cool test -- and eye-opening, too.

My scores had me hyper-heavy on the future side, and at least a shade low on hedonism. Which is good to remember: I like being future-minded and don't regret that, but this helps me remember to be a little more "hedonistic" -- to enjoy the present moment and, for God's sake, enjoy a football game...

Thanks for the heads up.