This is poll is part of larger research by Benjamin Herman. Professor Heather Elliott recomended it to me as a fascinating project. Below you will find a message from Benjamin. Please note that you can vote only once on your computer. The deadline for voting is Monday, 2 February 2009. Later on we might post here comments on results or links to discussion. Stay tuned and enjoy!
Hi – my name is Ben Herman. I’m from Los Angeles but I now live outside Washington DC. About 10 years ago, when I was working at a big Wall Street law firm, I got into the habit of passing the time at work by sending out random poll questions to my colleagues. What started as a sporadic indulgence has now become a much larger and more regular affair: I now do one poll every month and I typically get 150 responses. This year, in part with the help of Facebook, I am hoping to increase the number of participants. (If you are on Facebook, you can join the group “Ben Herman’s Poll Questions” if you are interested.) The biggest ongoing flaw in my polls is the insufficient representation of countries besides the United States, so I would be very happy if you took the time to answer this or any other poll question I may come up with.
As regards the First-Day-of-the-Week-Poll. To “inaugurate” this exciting new phase of my polling enterprise, for the first time ever I’m going to recycle an old poll question. I first did this one back in my law firm days, when I only had like 50 responders, but this was the poll that made me realize I had a hit on my hands–I knew because I was in the cafeteria a couple of hours after sending it out, and four Israeli associates were having lunch and arguing about the question I’d asked.
Thanks!
—–Comments by Benjamin Herman on the results of the poll—–
Thanks to everyone who participated in this latest poll—the first poll of the Facebook Era. Let’s get right to it.
I. BACKSTORY
Having grown up in the United States, I always considered Sunday the first day of the week. The reason is simple: on wall calendars in the United States, Sunday appears on the left end of the row that represents a week and Saturday on the right. Therefore, Sunday is the first day of the week and Saturday is the last. Game over.
Because I grew up organizing my weeks and months according to this American grid, that is how I visualize future time: as a series of weeks, with Sunday at the beginning of each week and Saturday at the end. It never occurred to me that there could be any other scheme—until I moved to the Czech Republic in 1991.
To make sense of my life, I need two things: Tony Robbins’s “Unlimited Power,” and a wall calendar. When I went to several Prague bookstores to find the latter, I discovered, to my horror, that these barbarians designed their calendars with Monday on the left, not Sunday. Clearly, the Soviets had screwed this country up even worse than I feared. Luckily, I had a trip planned to Norway, a place where Stalin’s goons had never been able to impose their bizarre notions of time. But when I got there I learned that this was one thing I couldn’t blame on Moscow. It seemed that Mondayism was a Europe-wide disease. These calendars reminded me of those novelty maps and globes you can get in New Zealand where the southern hemisphere is on top—totally valid, but not practical in light of my long-ingrained habits.
Later, though, I got to thinking: these Europeans have a point. It does make more sense to have Monday, the first day of school/work, as the first day. And it does make more sense to have the two weekend days, Saturday and Sunday, next to each other on the calendar rather than miles apart as they are on our calendars. I wondered if I was alone in being a slave to the arbitrary rules of the mighty Calendar Lobby and my countrymen had long ago made the mental adjustment to make Monday their First Day.
And how on earth did the United States come to have a different order of days than its cultural parents in Europe? Was it a religious thing? That didn’t seem likely, because the U.S. and Europe are both primarily Christian.
I also wondered what the custom was in other parts of the world—was there some country out there where the first day of the week is Wednesday? And come to think of it, who says a week needs to have seven days? If it’s all about the moon, maybe there are some places where each week is 14 days, or 28 days. A poll was born.
II. RESULTS
There were 213 responses to this poll. Overall, the voting broke down as follows:
Saturday – 9 votes (4.2%)
Sunday – 49 votes (23.0%)
Monday – 155 votes (72.8%)
A. This Saturday Thing
Right off the bat, then, you may notice something that surprised me—there’s a Saturday contingent out there! Not being very learned about Islam, I had no idea. But from doing this poll I have learned that in many parts of the Arab world and Central Asia, the first day of the week is Saturday—it’s the first day of the work week, the first day of school, etc. The Saturday contingent in this poll consisted of six Persians, an Iraqi, a Kyrgyz, and an Afghan.
B. The Monday Takeover
Obviously, when I launched this poll I expected Europeans to come in overwhelmingly in favor of Monday—and they did. 32 of the 33 Europeans (including Russians) polled answered Monday; only one lonely Englishwoman answered Sunday—and I just want to tell her that she is welcome in the US of A any time she wants to defect.
The real horserace, I thought, would be in the American vote (note: for purposes of this poll, “American” means North American). Would enough Americans defy the calendars they grew up with and vote Monday to make it close? Would Jews vote Sunday and churchgoers vote Monday? I was ready for a Florida-2000-style nailbiter. Alas, it turned out to be a Utah-2000-style landslide: even among Americans, Monday wins in a landslide. Not only that, religion plays no role whatsoever—in fact, American Jews were MORE likely to vote Monday than their non-chosen compatriots. Here are the numbers:
Overall American votes: 129 total
Sunday – 37 votes (28.7%)
Monday – 92 votes (71.3%)
Jewish votes (all Jews polled were American): 27 total
Sunday – 5 votes (18.5%)
Monday – 22 votes (81.5%)
American non-Jews: 102 total
Sunday – 32 votes (31.4%)
Monday – 70 votes (68.6%)
So if we look at the overall American vote, we see that over 70% of us conceptualize the week in a way that is directly at odds with the calendars that are at this very moment hanging on their kitchen walls. Is it me, or is there a business opportunity here? There is a huge untapped market out there of Americans who would rather have Monday be on the left side of their calendars. (If anyone does decide to run with this idea, I’ll expect a royalty.)
C. Other Parts of the World
1. There were six votes from Australia and New Zealand, and all six went for Monday.
2. East Asia (Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Laos, Nepal, and Indonesia) also went for Monday, by a vote of 17 to 7. (No votes for Saturday.)
3. The Iranian vote was the closest thing to a horserace; it seems that the longer the person had been out of Iran, the less likely she was to vote Saturday. But people who had been out of Iran for less than five years tended to vote Saturday. The final Iranian vote was: six votes for Saturday, three for Sunday, and five for Monday.
III. NOTES
These numbers prompted some intense self-reflection. Am I so unimaginative, so creatively constipated, that I can’t break free of the arbitrary and impractical week scheme that I happened to grow up with? And I have a question for you American Monday people: would you be disoriented at all by having a European calendar on your wall? (Please post your answers to the Facebook group’s discussion board.)
I thought that perhaps there is something that binds me and the other Sundays (a disproportionate number of lawyers, or ex-cons, or something), but as I scan the list of my fellow Sundayists, no patterns emerge. It’s a list that looks like America: believers and atheists; WASPs and immigrants; people who watch Grey’s Anatomy and people who would rather get a root canal. The Sunday list also includes people from Iran, Korea, Ghana, Nepal, Indonesia, and Taiwan.
It occurred to me, as I was compiling these results, that I can think of two songs in which the days of the week are listed in order: Police on My Back (written by Eddy Grant of Guyana) and Seven-Day Weekend (co-written by Elvis Costello (UK) and Jimmy Cliff (Jamaica)). In both songs, Monday is listed first. So I guess that proves that the Monday people are right.
IV. THE LINGERING MYSTERY
I still need to research when and how and why it happened that the United States and Canada split from Europe (and Australia/New Zealand) and started putting Sunday at the beginning of the week. Or maybe Europe used to be Sundayists too, only they later switched to a more reasonable Monday-based system. Kind of like what happened with the metric system—Europeans make a rational change; we Americans like our irrational system perfectly well, thank you very much. In any event, if I find out the story I will post it to the Facebook group’s discussion board devoted to this poll.
Until next time,
Ben
P.S. If you are on Facebook but have not joined the “Ben Herman’s Poll Questions” group, please consider doing so–thanks.
