Delay discounting: Interactions between personality and cognitive ability

Delay discounting describes the extent to which the value of a reward decreases as the delay to obtaining that reward increases. Lower discounting rates predict better outcomes in social, academic, and health domains. The current study investigates how personality and cognitive ability interact to predict individual differences in delay discounting. Extraversion was found to predict higher discounting rates at the low end of the cognitive distribution, while emotional stability was found to predict lower discounting rates at the high end of the cognitive distribution. These findings support recent models of discounting behavior and suggest that personality and cognitive ability interact in shaping decision making.     

Academic procrastination: The pattern and correlates of behavioural postponement

Using a series of computer-based assignments, we examined whether students’ submission patterns revealed a hyperbolic pattern of temporal discounting, such that few assignments are submitted far ahead of the deadline and submission of assignments accelerates at an increasing rate as the deadline becomes imminent. We further examined whether variables related to self-regulation – namely, self-reported procrastination, implementation intentions, say-do correspondence, and perceived academic control – correlated with behavioural postponement. Results revealed strong behavioural evidence of temporal discounting, especially among those who identified themselves as procrastinators. Among the self-regulation measures, only say-do correspondence consistently correlated with procrastination.     

Future anhedonia and time discounting

The temporal location of an event influences the way people mentally represent that event. We suggest (a) that such representational differences can produce an affective forecasting error that we call future anhedonia, which is the belief that hedonic states will be less intense in the future than in the present, and (b) that future anhedonia plays a role in time discounting (i.e., the tendency to place a smaller present value on present events than on future events). Experiments 1a and 1b demonstrated that people are prone to future anhedonia, Experiments 2a and 2b ruled out artifactual alternatives, and Experiments 3a and 3b demonstrated that future anhedonia plays a role in time discounting. These studies suggest that one reason why people prefer to enjoy benefits in the present and pay costs in the future is that they do not realize how they will feel when those costs and benefits are actually experienced.