Cognitive Resources and Affect in Time Discounting

时间贴现中的认知资源和影响

• 批准号: 0111919
• 负责人: Drazen Prelec
• 金额: $ 10.07万
• 依托单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2001
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2001-09-01 至 2002-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0111919&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Cognitive; Resources; Affect; Time; Discounting

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.

德拉赞·普雷莱克 未来是“不真实的”人们似乎常常不太关注未来。在做出当前的消费或储蓄、坚持节食、锻炼或戒烟决定时，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，特别是为什么远距离回报相对于即时回报如此微弱。目前的研究测试了遥远的未来看起来“不真实”的想法-即人们在认知上处理未来事件，就好像它们是假设的一样。因此，他们通常很少关注未来事件，并赋予它很少的价值，导致非常高的“隐含”低估。当被迫关注未来的事件时，作为第一次通过的人首先只关注事件，然后将时间信息纳入更具分析性的第二次通过评估。由此产生的“显性”低估可能比拟议的隐性低估小得多。本研究在四个实验中测试这些问题，使用记忆，图像和努力调查遥远的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。