Are Rich Countries More Future Oriented?
Levels of public interest in the future may be related to differences in national wealth, suggest researchers at University College London. Analyzing Google search queries, they found that Internet users in countries with higher per capita GDP are more likely to search for information about the future than about the past.
The team devised a “future orientation index” based on search queries made by Internet users in 45 countries in 2010, comparing the frequency of searches about the coming year (2011) versus the previous year (2009). They then examined the user countries’ GDPs, finding a strong relationship between inquiries about the future and higher GDP.
Whether a people’s interest in the future is a “luxury” of being relatively well-to-do or a factor contributing to national well-being cannot be concluded from the research. The project’s goal is to use the massive amount of data generated by Internet searches to help better understand society’s complexity.
Source: University College London, www.ucl.ac.uk. The study, “Quantifying the Advantage of Looking Forward” by Tobias Preis, Helen Susannah Moat, H. Eugene Stanley, and Steven R. Bishop, was published in Scientific Reports and based on Google Trends data at www.google.com/trends.
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