Zimbardo's Five Time Perspectives and the 6 a.m. Snooze Button
Zimbardo and Boyd's 1999 time perspective inventory sorts attitudes to time into five factors. Two of them explain why mornings stall and restarts never happen.
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Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd handed students 56 statements about time in 1999 and found that the answers sorted into five attitudes, two of which are in the room when your phone goes off at 6 a.m. One is a taste for the present moment, the other is a shrug about whether anything you do will matter. Their paper, “Putting Time in Perspective: A Valid, Reliable Individual-Differences Metric” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1271-1288), introduced the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, or ZTPI. This post uses it to read the snooze button, with some caution about how far a questionnaire can carry the argument.
What are the five ZTPI factors?
The inventory returns five scores. Zimbardo and Boyd named them past-negative, past-positive, present-hedonistic, present-fatalistic and future. Here they are in plain language, each with an invented example of a morning decision. These are illustrations written for this post. None are quotes from the inventory or from anyone’s data.
| Factor | In plain language | A morning decision it could produce |
|---|---|---|
| Past-negative | The past is mostly regret and things that went wrong | “I never get up when I say I will, so why would today differ?” |
| Past-positive | The past is warm, familiar, worth keeping | Getting up early because the family always had breakfast together |
| Present-hedonistic | What feels good now gets priority; consequences are lightly weighted | Taking nine more minutes because the bed is warm and the cost comes later |
| Present-fatalistic | Outcomes are fixed, so effort now is pointless | “I’m already behind, it won’t matter anyway” |
| Future | Plans, deadlines and later payoffs steer the choice | Getting up because the 9:30 meeting needs preparing |
Two details are easy to miss. The factors are separate scales, so someone can score high on several at once. And Zimbardo and Boyd treat time perspective as a habitual lean that situations can push around, which makes it a poor fixed label, so a person can behave hedonistically at 6 a.m. and futuristically at 2 p.m.
Why is the snooze a present-hedonistic trade?
At 6:00 the nine extra minutes arrive immediately and feel good. The payoff for getting up (a calmer commute, an uninterrupted hour, being on time) lands hours later and is spread thin. A present-hedonistic lean weights the first heavily and the second lightly. Nothing about this needs a flaw in character, only a reading of the decision in which the near reward is the only vivid one.
If this sounds like hyperbolic discounting, it overlaps, but the ZTPI adds something the discounting curve does not: it covers orientation toward the past, and it has a factor for fatalism. Discounting explains why a smaller reward now beats a bigger one later. It says little about the voice that says no reward is coming whatever you do.
What does the present-fatalistic voice do to a restart?
The fatalistic factor is the one that fits restarts badly. The hedonistic voice says “nine minutes, why not.” The fatalistic voice shows up after the first slip and says the morning is already lost, the week is already lost, and the plan was always going to fail. If you believe that, a second snooze, skipping the walk and writing off the day all follow. Studies that used the ZTPI have reported that present-fatalism goes with lower academic achievement and lower conscientiousness, which would fit this pattern of giving up early. Those studies are correlational and self-reported, so they cannot say whether fatalistic thinking causes the giving up or is the story people tell after repeated failure. Probably both happen. Why people keep starting over covers the restart habit itself, which this factor helps explain.
What do we know about future orientation and outcomes?
In the original paper, the Future factor correlated with conscientiousness, and later work using the ZTPI has linked higher future orientation to better grades in student samples in student samples. The evidence supports an association. People who plan ahead may get better grades for many reasons that have nothing to do with time attitudes, and the inventory is a self-report. It cannot diagnose anyone, and a low future score is not a verdict on you.
The more useful point comes from The Time Paradox (Zimbardo and Boyd, 2008): the aim is balance rather than maximum future. People who live entirely in the future can miss the present, and a present-hedonistic streak is part of why anyone enjoys anything.
How do you bring the future into the 6 a.m. moment?
If the trouble is that the payoff is far away and the pleasure is near, one option is to move a piece of the future to the moment of decision. You can do this with nothing but a pen: the night before, write the first thing tomorrow’s hour will buy you (the unhurried coffee, the 20 pages, the email that will not be late) and put the note on the phone you will have to pick up. Night-you and morning-you disagree about how that feels, and a note written at night is at least in the room when morning-you picks the phone up.
An app can do the same thing with a cost instead of a reward. DontSnooze is an iOS app (Android is on the roadmap, with no date). When the alarm fires you have 30 seconds to record video proof that you are up. If you do not, a random photo from your camera roll is posted to your friends in the app, where it stays for 48 hours with screenshots disabled. The consequence of the snooze now arrives at 6:00, with an audience, well before 9:30. The how-it-works page has the details. Watching your friends is free, and posting your own proof and streaks needs Pro ($8.99 a week, $17.99 a month or $59.99 a year).
I cannot say this changes anyone’s ZTPI scores, and I have no data that it does. It changes the price of the nine minutes at the moment they are for sale. Fatalism is a separate matter. A miss under this arrangement is a bounded event that disappears after 48 hours, which at least gives the “it won’t matter anyway” voice less to point at, though that is a hope and not a result.
Where does the ZTPI stop being useful?
It is one self-report scale from one research tradition. Critics have questioned whether the five-factor structure holds the same way across cultures, and shorter versions of the inventory do not always reproduce it. A questionnaire score is also a snapshot of attitudes, and your 6 a.m. behavior depends on sleep, noise, stress and plain habit. Treat the five factors as a vocabulary for asking where the weight is going in a decision, not as a measurement of who you are.
If your fatalistic voice says the next decade will look like this one, the end-of-history illusion is the research that argues against it.
Questions about the inventory
How long is the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory, and what do the scores mean?
The original ZTPI has 56 statements, each rated for how characteristic it is of you, and it returns five separate scores, one per factor. Shorter research versions exist for surveys that cannot afford 56 items. The scores are best read against other people or against your own earlier scores, and they describe attitudes to time in a research setting and are no clinical diagnosis.
Is a high future orientation always the goal?
Not in Zimbardo and Boyd’s own account. The Time Paradox (2008) argues for a balanced profile, with a lot of past-positive, a moderate amount of future and present-hedonistic, and little past-negative or present-fatalistic. Someone who lives almost entirely in the future can miss the pleasures that make the long-term work worth doing.
Can a person score high on both future and present-hedonistic?
Yes. The five factors are scored independently, so they are not ends of one line. A person can plan carefully for next year and also put a high value on a good evening, which is much of what the balanced profile looks like.