The pace of life in 31 countries: Western Europeans combine a fast pace with ample leisure, while Latin Americans take their time both on and off the job

American Demographics, Nov, 1997 by Robert Levine

Western Europeans combine a fast pace with ample leisure, while Latin Americans take their time both on and off the job.

There is something about poking around in foreign cultures that compels a person to compare-to compare one culture to another, and your own life to theirs. In my own case, the comparisons always seem to center around time. For the last ten years, my dual preoccupations-traveling and social psychology-have converged on two questions: Which cultures are fastest or slowest? And how does this cultural tempo affect the quality of peoples' lives? My interest in these questions has been provoked by visits to other cultures; but I have searched for answers through the systematic methods of social science.

Comparing the personalities of different cultures is a tricky business. Labeling individuals is complex enough; how does a scientist presume to classify whole groups of people? To measure the tempo of life with any degree of systematic objectivity requires moving beyond anecdotal descriptions. We need to zero in on situations that are not only informative about temporal experience, but which also have the same psychological meaning in different cultures. Developing these measures has been more difficult than I had anticipated.

Eventually, three measures of the pace of life were developed: (1) walking speed-the speed with which pedestrians in downtown areas walk a distance of 60 feet; (2) work speed-how quickly postal clerks complete a standard request to purchase a stamp; and (3) the accuracy of public clocks. My students and I have made these observations in as many countries as we have been able to get to. In a few countries, I have conducted the experiments myself; more often, the data have been collected by interested students from my university who were either traveling to foreign countries or returning to their home cities or countries for the summer. In all, we have collected data in at least one large city in each of 31 nations around the world.

Thirty-one Countries Compared

Japan and Western European countries scored fastest overall. Eight of the nine fastest countries were from Western Europe, with Japan the lone intruder on this monopoly.

Switzerland achieved the distinction of first place, based on across-the-board high rankings: its walking speed ranked third, postal times ranked second, and-in one hell of a splendid finding, I must say-clock accuracy ranked first; their bank clocks were off by an average of a grand total of 19 seconds. Ireland ranked second, clocking in with the fastest walking speed of the 31 countries. Germany finished just behind, in third place, overall.

Japan was a close fourth. The three countries scoring ahead did so by very narrow margins-a few seconds here or there and the Japanese would have been in first place. There is, in fact, considerable evidence that Japan may be the fastest country of all. On the postal measure, for example, the Japanese had to settle for fourth, but where else besides Japan would our experimenter encounter postal clerks who sometimes wrapped the stamp in a little package, or, without being asked or required, sometimes wrote out receipts? We tried to correct for these extra seconds in our final tallies, but can one really give due credit to postal clerks who operate at near capacity speed while providing luxury service? The clerks in Frankfurt may have scored a few seconds faster, but it is difficult to imagine consumers there leaving the post office feeling like they had just made a purchase at Tiffany's.

Then there's New York City. In the main post office (the proud owner of zip code 10001), one clerk held my note over her head, and proceeded to announce, very slowly and very loudly, to the line behind me and to much of the rest of midtown Manhattan: "You mean to tell me that you want one lousy stamp and you're giving me a (speaking even more slowly and loudly now, her cadence beginning to sound like the score from Bolero) five-dollar bill?" After a short pause, and a handful of double takes at both the note and at me, she cranked up the volume a few more decibels, announcing: "God, how I hate this city." Not only was this my most embarrassing moment as a researcher, but her speech so frightened me that I forgot to time her progress. (New York and Budapest were the only cities where experimenters reported being insulted by clerks.)

Whether Japan or Switzerland deserves the gold medal for speed remains an arguable issue, but without question the most remarkable finding at the front end of the rankings was the consistently fast scores from Western Europe. Eight of the nine Western European countries tested (Switzerland, Ireland, Germany, Italy, England, Sweden, Austria, and the Netherlands) were faster than every other country other than Japan. The only "trailer" from Western Europe was France, which allowed Hong Kong (hardly a slouch in the hard-work category itself) to come in a notch in front of it. And even this minor slippage may have been the quirk of a rare environmental event: the Parisian measures were taken during the height of one of the hottest summers the city had ever experienced.