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High-Resolution Effects of Modified Episodic Future Thinking: Personalized Age-Progressed Pictures Improve Risky Long-Term Health Decisions
Kaplan, Brent A.
Kaplan, Brent A.
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Abstract
Many of our everyday choices are associated with outcomes that are both delayed and probabilistic. The tyranny of small decisions describes a chronic pattern of present-bias decisions that result in negative outcomes in the future. The temporal attention hypothesis suggests that individuals' decision making can be improved by focusing attention to temporally distal events and reducing the desire for proximate outcomes. Viewing discounting within a temporal attention framework implies that environmental manipulations that expand the limits of an individual's temporal perspective by bringing focus on temporally distal outcomes, and thereby reducing present bias, may alter his/her degree of discounting. One such manipulation, episodic future thinking (EpFT), has shown to successfully lower discount rates. Several questions remain as to the applicability of EpFT to domains other than temporal discounting. The present experiments examine the effects of a modified EpFT procedure on probability discounting in the context of both a delayed health gain and loss. Results indicate the modified EpFT procedure effectively altered individuals' degree of discounting in the predicted directions and lend further support to the temporal attention hypothesis.
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Date
2014-12-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Behavioral sciences, Psychology, discounting, episodic future thinking, humans, probability discounting, risky decision making, temporal attention