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. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ‘‘I’d gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” J. Wellington Wimpy Sooner or later, most people take advantage of themselves. They eat fattening desserts, engage in unprotected sex, use credit cards to finance exotic vacations, take out home equity loans to buy luxury goods, let work pile up while they surf the web—and they enjoy these pleasures knowing full well that they their future selves will have to pay for them. Time discounting is the tendency to put a higher present value on events that will happen in the present than on events that will happen in the future, and numerous studies have found evidence for a ‘‘pervasive devaluation of the future” (Ainslie & Haslam, 1992, p. 59). The standard account of this phenomenon suggests that people know how miserable they will be when it comes time to pay for their present indulgences, but that they are unwilling or unable to give this knowledge the weight it deserves (Ainslie & Haslam, 1992; Berns, Laibson, & Loewenstein, 2007; Frederick, Loewenstein, & O’Donoghue, 2003; McClure, Laibson, Loewenstein, & Cohen, 2004; Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989; Soman et al., 2005). We suggest that, in fact, people may not know how they will feel when the future arrives. A growing body of work suggests that the temporal location of an event influences the way that event is mentally represented. Representations of present and ll rights reserved. h Grant # BCS-0722132 from and Timothy D. Wilson. We ersion of this paper, and John ollins for their help with the . Gilbert). future events are not like two photographs with different time stamps, but rather, they are like two photographs taken from different angles with different lenses and different settings (Caruso, Gilbert, & Wilson, in press; McClure et al., 2004; Schacter, Addis, & Buckner, 2007; Trope & Liberman, 2003; Van Boven & Ashworth, 2007). Specifically, representations of future events tend to include central, abstract, and general features of the event whereas representations of present events tend to include peripheral, concrete, and specific features of the event (Trope & Liberman, 2003). As a result of these differences, representations of future events tend to evoke less intense affect than do representations of present events (McClure et al., 2004). Because people often use the affect they feel as they are imagining a future event to predict how they will feel when they experience that event (Gilbert & Wilson, 2007), they may mistakenly believe that they will experience less intense affect when an event happens in the future than when the same event happens in the present. We refer to this belief as future anhedonia. If future anhedonia exists, it may provide a very different solution to the puzzle of time discounting. Why do people so often accelerate benefits so they can experience them in the present and delay costs so they can pay them in the future? It is typically assumed that people know how they will feel when it comes time to pay costs in the future but that for many reasons they underweight this knowledge. But if people mistakenly believe that their future feelings will be less intense than their present feelings, then time discounting may actually reflect their attempt to maximize benefits by enjoying them at their hedonic zenith (the present) and minimize costs by paying them at their hedonic nadir (the future). If a person mistakenly believed that eating a hamburger would be more pleasurable today than next 1534 K.S. Kassam et al. / Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44 (2008) 1533–1537 Tuesday, or that paying for a hamburger would be less painful next Tuesday than it would be today, then he or she might be inclined to acquire the hamburger on credit today (when its hedonic benefits are high) and pay for it next Tuesday (when its hedonic costs are low). What would appear to an observer to be a reckless disregard for future feelings might actually be a simple inability to predict them. In Experiments 1a and 1b we sought to determine whether people do, in fact, expect their affective reactions to an event to be less intense in the future than in the present. In Experiments 2a and 2b we explored alternative explanations of this phenomenon. In Experiments 3a and 3b we sought to determine whether this phenomenon plays a role in time discounting. Experiments 1a–1b: demonstrating future anhedonia