Cognitive Resources and Affect in Time Discounting

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AbstractPrelec, Drazen The future is "unreal"People often seem to pay little attention to the future. They may give future consequences little weight when making current decisions about spending or saving money, sticking to a diet, exercising, or giving up smoking. Although we know people commonly undervalue the future, researchers have little understanding of why this undervaluation occurs, particularly why the distant rewards are so weak relative to immediate rewards. The present research tests the idea that the distant future appears "unreal" - i.e. that people cognitively process future events as if they were hypothetical. Therefore they typically pay the future event little attention and assign it little value resulting in a very high "implicit" undervaluation. When forced to pay attention to an event in the future, as a first-pass people first focus on the event alone before incorporating the time information in a more analytical second-pass evaluation. The resulting "explicit" undervaluation may be much smaller than the proposed implicit undervaluation. The present research tests these questions in four experiments using memory, imagery and effort to investigate similarities between distant future events and hypothetical events. These findings would have significant implications for decisions in areas ranging from personal health and finance to education and public policy.