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. 2012:2:350.
doi: 10.1038/srep00350. Epub 2012 Apr 5.

Quantifying the advantage of looking forward

Tobias Preis, Helen Susannah Moat, H Eugene Stanley, Steven R Bishop

Quantifying the advantage of looking forward

Tobias Preis et al. Sci Rep. 2012.

Abstract

We introduce a future orientation index to quantify the degree to which Internet users worldwide seek more information about years in the future than years in the past. We analyse Google logs and find a striking correlation between the country's GDP and the predisposition of its inhabitants to look forward.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. The future orientation index, and its correlation with per capita GDP.
(a) The frequency with which Google users worldwide search for information about the previous year (in red) and the following year (in blue). Data are plotted for each of 52 weeks per year. The future orientation index for a given year (e.g., 2010) is calculated as the ratio of the total number of searches for the following year (“2011”) to the total number of searches for the previous year (“2009”). (b) The future orientation index for 45 countries based on searches in 2010, compared with per capita GDP. We demonstrate a strong tendency for countries in which Google users enquire more about the future to possess a larger per capita GDP (Pearson correlation coefficient r = 0.78, df = 43, p < 0.001).
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