Robert Levine
Biography
Robert Victor Levine (25 August 1945, Brooklyn – 22 June 2019, Santa Rosa) was an American social psychologist, professor of psychology at California State University, Fresno, where he also served as department chair and as associate dean of the College of Science and Mathematics. He held visiting professorships in Brazil, Japan, Sweden and the United Kingdom, and his research concerned the social psychology of time, helping behaviour, persuasion and the nature of the self.[1]
A Geography of Time
A Geography of Time: On Tempo, Culture, and the Pace of Life (Basic Books, 1997) is his best-known work, subtitled The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently.
The book grew from Levine's experience of teaching in Brazil, where his own assumptions about lateness, appointments and the meaning of an agreed time proved not to be shared. Rather than treating this as an anecdote, he built a research programme around it, and the methodological invention is what makes the book durable: he devised simple, comparable field measures of the pace of life and ran them in cities across dozens of countries. Three of them became standard — the average walking speed of pedestrians over a 60-foot stretch of downtown pavement, the time taken by a postal clerk to complete a standard transaction, and the accuracy of public clocks.
The resulting rankings are less interesting than what they revealed about correlates. Faster places tended to be economically productive, colder, more individualistic and more urban; they also tended to have higher rates of coronary heart disease and, in Levine's parallel studies, lower rates of spontaneous helping behaviour toward strangers. Levine was careful about causation and clear that neither pace is superior, but the trade-off he identified — between economic vitality and both health and everyday kindness — is the book's central finding.
Key Ideas
- Clock time and event time. The distinction that organises the book. Under clock time, activities begin and end when the clock says so; under event time, they begin when the preceding activity has finished and end when they are done. Neither is a failure of the other, and people from each find the other's conduct inexplicable — the clock-time visitor sees disorganisation, the event-time host sees rudeness. Levine's account is a fuller empirical development of the monochronic/polychronic distinction proposed by Edward Hall.
- Duration is judged, not measured. Levine's laboratory work concerns how the same interval is experienced differently depending on activity, expectation, temperature, age and culture — and why waiting is the situation in which the gap between clock time and felt time opens widest.
- Temporal cost of speed. The observation that increases in the pace of life do not free time up. Faster tools raise the expected rate of everything and leave the sense of hurry intact or worse.
Other Work
The Power of Persuasion: How We're Bought and Sold (2003) applies the same field-experiment sensibility to influence, treating persuasion as an ordinary environmental condition rather than an exceptional event. Stranger in the Mirror: The Scientific Search for the Self (2016) turns to the relationship between brain, consciousness and the sense of being a single person.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Levine gives an empirical basis to something usually asserted. Networked technology is a machine for imposing clock time — timestamps, read receipts, response-time expectations, calendars that treat a day as allocable blocks — on activities that were previously governed by event time, and his findings about the correlates of pace suggest what that substitution costs. His work on waiting is equally applicable: the felt duration of a loading spinner is a designed quantity, and most designs do not account for it.
Related Reading
- Edward Hall
- Time and Space
- Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance
- Frictional Interface
- Timothy Ferriss
References
- ↑ Robert V. Levine; see also A Geography of Time, Basic Books, 1997.
