Hodroj, Latham, and Miller (2024) conducted a study to test whether the Moving Open Future Hypothesis (MOFH) is a viable explanation for why people represent time as robustly passing. Their study failed to find any significant associations that supported MOFH. Our attempt to replicate their study in a Chinese context found different results. As we explain in this paper, both our replication study and a follow-up study found that the judgments of Chinese participants aligned with what MOFH predic…
Read moreHodroj, Latham, and Miller (2024) conducted a study to test whether the Moving Open Future Hypothesis (MOFH) is a viable explanation for why people represent time as robustly passing. Their study failed to find any significant associations that supported MOFH. Our attempt to replicate their study in a Chinese context found different results. As we explain in this paper, both our replication study and a follow-up study found that the judgments of Chinese participants aligned with what MOFH predicts. Thus, we suggest that it is too soon to abandon MOFH in favor of alternative explanations. Furthermore, we suggest that the viability of MOFH as an explanation might be relative to a cultural context. More specifically, MOFH posits inferential connections between beliefs about the future and beliefs about the passage of time. The reliability of those connections might depend on how much experience people have entertaining them. For instance, people embedded in a culture with strong fate-based reasoning might be better at reasoning about a merely subjectively open future.
