Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: Devaluing future outcomes, known as temporal discounting (Frederick, Loewenstein, & O'Donoghue, 2002), hinders one's ability to act in line with long-term over short-term interests.It is associated with maladaptive behaviors such as smoking (Kirby, Petry, & Bickel, 1999), drug use (Harrison, Lau, & Rutström, 2010), and not saving for retirement (Gubler & Pierce, 2014).Because temporal discounting may impact a variety of behaviors ranging from exercising to energy consumption (Urminsky & Zauberman, 2015), understanding the factors that influence temporal discounting is critical for researchers in psychology, economics, business, and public policy.Joshi and Fast (2013) provided evidence that increased social power (control over valued resources; Magee & Galinsky, 2008) reduces temporal discounting.This finding has important applied, theoretical, and empirical implications.First, it implies the potential to mitigate temporal discounting with power.Psychological and health science researchers have thus recently advocated for empowerment as an intervention to improve balancing of long-term and short-term interests in decision-making (Gubler & Pierce, 2014;Patton et al., 2016; Urminsky & Zauberman, 2015).Second, it informs the theoretical debate on how power affects self-control.Temporal discounting may be thought of as a self-control conflict between having a smaller reward sooner versus a larger reward later (Frederick, Loewenstein, & O'Donoghue, 2002;Mischel, Rodriguez, and Shoda, 1989).The approach-inhibition theory of power (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003) posits that high power activates the behavioral approach system, which increases impulsivity and sensitivity to rewards.Therefore, high-power individuals should be more likely to prefer earlier to delayed rewards, and thus show more temporal discounting, than low-power individuals.In contrast, the social distance theory of power (Magee & Smith, 2013) predicts the
Source: Psychological Science
Authors: Min Zhang, Pamela K. Smith
Institution: University of California San Diego
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2799580391