Joseph Henrich

This still didn't seem to change anything at all.

Everybody was wearing the watches.

Right.

And then on one funny occasion, I was working closely, we were looking at this laptop with a research assistant, and I happened to look down at his watch and it said something like 11.20.

And it turned out his watch was about 25 minutes off.

And so I think it had been that way for weeks or possibly longer.

Yeah, that's right.

In lots of places, it's considered bad to be paying too much attention to the time.

When you meet with somebody, you shouldn't be rushing off to your next thing.

You should be taking time to connect with them, see how their family is, swap stories, sort of reconnect, focusing on the social.

I mean, in some societies, the clock is seen as the kind of the devil, right?

Because it's what drives people away from really forming these tight social bonds and nurturing the social bonds through time.

Psychologists Arnor and Zion and colleagues have actually gone around the world and tried to measure this in different cities.

And they found that things like how long it takes to get to a stamp, the rate at which the guy behind the counter is moving actually varies from city to city.

And they actually correlated with the measures of individualism for those cities.

That's right.

And the person behind the counter is actually moving faster, and the clocks in public places are more accurate, so that you can measure the accuracy of the clocks in public places.

Yeah, and it restructures our life.

One of the amazing things, and you can find this in the work of Ben Franklin, is that he emphasizes the equation between time and money, which is not something you find elsewhere.

And of course, this metaphor has now spread globally.