Cognitive Resources and Affect in Time Discounting

【摘要】未来是“不真实的”，人们似乎常常不太关注未来。当他们在做消费或存钱、坚持饮食、锻炼或戒烟的决定时，他们可能不会考虑未来的后果。虽然我们知道人们通常低估未来，但研究人员对这种低估发生的原因知之甚少，特别是为什么远期回报相对于眼前回报如此之弱。目前的研究验证了这样一种观点，即遥远的未来似乎是“不真实的”——也就是说，人们在认知上处理未来的事件，就好像它们是假设的一样。因此，他们通常很少关注未来的事件，并赋予它很少的价值，导致非常高的“隐性”低估。当被迫关注未来的事件时，作为第一次通过的人，在将时间信息纳入更具分析性的第二次通过评估之前，首先将注意力集中在事件上。由此产生的“显性”低估可能比提议的隐性低估小得多。目前的研究在四个实验中测试了这些问题，使用记忆、想象和努力来调查遥远未来事件和假设事件之间的相似性。这些发现将对从个人健康和财务到教育和公共政策等领域的决策产生重大影响。

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.