The Universal Pleasures of 7 PM

At that time of day all over the world, most people are experiencing a "largely pleasant social interaction."

By Eric Jaffe

If there's a time when you'd seem least likely to be doing the same thing as someone else, a good guess might be about 7 p.m. Late at night, most of us are sleeping. During the day, most of us are working. And early in the morning most of us are somewhere between sleep and work. It's the evening that provides the most flexibility: maybe we're putting in some late hours at the office, maybe we're eating dinner, maybe we're watching TV. In the grand scheme of things, 7 p.m. feels like the snowflake of o'clocks.
Which makes the upshot of a very original new study that much more fascinating: At 7 p.m., around the world, we all feel more or less the same about what we're doing. That's the finding from a massive study team, with 33 worldwide collaborators, led by psychologist Esther Guillaume of the University of California at Riverside. Sampling more than 5,400 individuals from 20 countries, the researchers found that people across countries (and within the same) made highly similar assessments of life at 7 p.m.
From their paper, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Personality (spotted by the Neuroskeptic):

[T]he situational experience of individuals around the world at 7 p.m. was, on average, highly similar and largely pleasant, and the homogeneity of individual situational experience was nearly as large between as within countries. This finding emerged even though the study examined situational experience in 20 countries, on 5 continents, using materials rendered in 14 different languages.

Motivated by the fact that research into mundane situations "remains rare," Guillaume and her fellow researchers sought to assess the "psychological aspects" of a typical evening setting. First they asked study participants to give an open-ended summary of what they'd done the previous night at 7 p.m.: who they were with, what they were doing, where they were. Here's a global sample of some of the responses:

• U.S.: "My cousin came over and we were relaxing on the balcony after a day of snowboarding. We were smoking cigarettes and drinking wine."
• Singapore: "I was at my grandma's house eating dinner. I was with my cousins, aunts, uncles, grandma and my own family."
• Japan: "I sang using the karaoke box with my friend."
• Italy: "I was cooking pizza with my boyfriend."
• Estonia: "At about 7 I was sitting in the sauna with my grandmother, adding some steam and whisking."

But open-ended answers are tough to compare across cultures. So the researchers then administered a test to gauge the "psychological properties of situations" called the Riverside Situational Q‐sort. The RSQ offers 89 wide-ranging descriptions of a situation—it's "potentially enjoyable," or it "calls for self-restraint," or it "contains physical threats"—and asks participants to rate them on a scale of least to most characteristic of the situation in question (in this case, the previous 7 p.m.).