{"pk":25780,"title":"Representations of Time Affect Willingness to Wait for Future Rewards","subtitle":null,"abstract":"How do representations of the future shape behavior? Prior\nresearch has shown that people’s willingness to wait for a\nfuture reward decreases with increases in time. At the same\ntime, this research has also shown that such effects can\ndepend on the vividness of the future reward, as well as, on\nindividual differences. The present research offers a potential\nexplanation for these additional effects in demonstrating how\nrepresentations of the future can depend not only on objective\ndistances in time, but also on how distances in time are\nconstrued. In a series of three experiments using a delay\ndiscounting paradigm, we show that participants who\nrepresent the future as close to the present are more likely to\nwait for future rewards than those who represent the future as\nfar, even when the objective distances are held constant.\nApplications are discussed to public policy issues such as\nglobal warming, and to episodic future thinking","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"psychological distance; delay discounting;\nepisodic future thinking"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/115087zp","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Robert","middle_name":"","last_name":"Thorstad","name_suffix":"","institution":"Emory University","department":""},{"first_name":"Aiming","middle_name":"","last_name":"Nie","name_suffix":"","institution":"Emory University","department":""},{"first_name":"Phillip","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wolff","name_suffix":"","institution":"Emory University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25780/galley/15404/download/"}]}