Deliberating trade-offs with the future

Abstract

Many fundamental choices in life are intertemporal: they involve trade-offs between sooner and later outcomes. In recent years there has been a surge of interest into how people make intertemporal decisions, given that such decisions are ubiquitous in everyday life and central in domains from substance use to climate change action. While it is clear that people make decisions according to rules, intuitions and habits, they also commonly deliberate over their options, thinking through potential outcomes and reflecting on their own preferences. In this Perspective, we bring to bear recent research into the higher-order capacities that underpin deliberation-particularly those that enable people to think about the future (prospection) and their own thinking (metacognition)-to shed light on intertemporal decision-making. We show how a greater appreciation for these mechanisms of deliberation promises to advance our understanding of intertemporal decision-making and unify a wide range of otherwise disparate choice phenomena.

Fig.1.. Deliberating over anticipated changes of mind

a, A popular hyperbolic model describing delay discounting; higher k values represent steeper discounting of value with time, while lower k values represent shallower discounting. b, A preference for a larger, later, reward relative to a smaller, sooner one can change when both move closer in time. The interaction of metacognition and prospection enables people to anticipate these preference reversals. c, This interaction also underlies the insight that the future contains mutually exclusive possibilities, such as adhering to a diet or not. People evaluate these alternative futures on dimensions such as plausibility or likelihood, which helps explain precommitment (throwing away one’s doughnuts). Doughnut image credit: Sam Howzit; Salad image credit: Marco Verch. d, In the hyperbolic discounting model k is a free scaling parameter that accentuates or dampens the effect of delay on value.

Fig. 2.. Deliberation in intertemporal choice phenomena.

a, Schematic of postulated role for metacognition and prospection in delay discounting of negative outcomes. With increasing time, the subjective impact of a negative outcome decreases: people tend to prefer postponing negative events. However, with the capacity to anticipate the dread leading to a negative outcome, people sometimes opt to get negative experiences “over with”. This would correspond to a reduced discounting of the impact of a negative outcome. b, Cuing participants to imagine either positive or negative future events reduces delay discounting relative to neutral control mental imagery (n=297), data from Bulley et al. c, Asking participants to justify their choices increases cognitive control, and this reduces the magnitude effect by selectively increasing patience for smaller rewards; large rewards are presumed to already elicit greater control (n=1,382). Reproduced with permission from ref., Sage Publications.