Associations Between Delay Discounting and Risk‐Related Behaviors, Traits, Attitudes, and Outcomes

Abstract

Delay discounting—preference for immediate, smaller rewards over distal, larger rewards—has been argued to be part of the “generality of deviance”, which describes the co‐occurrence of various forms of impulsive and risky behaviors among individuals. Some studies have linked laboratory‐measured delay discounting to behaviors, traits, attitudes, and outcomes associated with risk, but these associations have been inconsistent. Furthermore, many of these studies have been conducted with exclusively undergraduate samples, or in samples offering low statistical power. In a large community sample (n = 328) diverse in age and socioeconomic status, we examined associations between two measures of behavioral delay discounting (single‐shot and canonical k‐parameter estimation) and behavioral risk‐taking, personality traits associated with risk, domain‐specific risk attitudes, gambling and problem gambling, antisocial behavior, and criminal outcomes. In addition, we explored whether a novel response time latency measure of delay discounting explained variance in these risk‐related outcomes. Results indicated that behavioral delay discounting was consistently associated with all variables related to impulse control: high trait impulsivity, low trait self‐control, risk‐averse attitudes toward financial investment, risk‐prone attitudes toward gambling and health/safety risks, gambling and problem gambling, antisocial conduct, and criminal outcomes. Latency‐measured delay discounting was inconsistently associated with behavioral delay discounting and risk‐related measures. Together, results suggest that delay discounting is associated with poor impulse control consistent with a generality of deviance account. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Technological advances in the assessment of impulse control in offenders: A systematic review

“…One form of impulsive decision‐making is delay discounting, or the tendency to seek immediate, smaller rewards instead of larger rewards that are delayed in time. Not surprisingly, previous research has found that offenders exhibit problems delaying gratification on delay discounting tasks (Åkerlund, Golsteyn, Grönqvist, & Lindahl, ; Carroll et al, ; Lee et al, ; Mishra & Lalumière, ). In addition, steeper devaluing of delayed rewards significantly predicts future engagement in criminal behaviour, even after controlling for several other known risk factors (Lee et al, ).…”

The influence of groups and alcohol consumption on individual risk-taking

“…For example, selecting an immediate £5 payoff, over a £10 reward given the following day. As with behavioural disinhibition, delay discounting has found to be associated with increased risk-taking (Courtney et al, 2012;Mishra & Lalumière, 2017), and seems to be elevated in heavy and harmful drinkers (Moody, Tegge, & Bickel, 2017). As such, both constructs of impulsivity are seemingly related to both risk-taking and alcohol use.…”

Measuring delay discounting in a crowdsourced sample: An exploratory study

“…Contrary to previous findings, delay discounting was not associated with personal relative deprivation (e.g., Callan et al ., ; Tabri, Shead & Wohl, ), smoking cigarettes (e.g., Bickel, Odum & Madden, ; Reimers et al ., ), or procrastination (Schouwenburg & Groenewoud, ). Additionally, delay discounting was only sometimes related to arrests (e.g., Mishra & Lalumière, ) and frequency of drinking alcohol. However, these differences may be due to the measurement differences in the present study; that is, we assessed frequency of alcohol intake instead of alcoholism (e.g., Petry, ).…”

“…We adapted a single‐shot discounting measure (Mishra & Lalumière, , ; Reimers et al ., ) to an online format after piloting various payment structures (see Table ). Participants were presented with the following question: “Would you prefer: $0.15 today or $0.23 in 21 days?” Those who chose the immediate option (i.e., those who discounted the future) were coded as 1 and those who chose the delayed option were coded as −1, such that positive scores indicated greater discounting.…”

“…All other measures were presented at the end of the survey along with demographic variables. We chose the outcome measures because delay discounting has been previously related to impulsivity (Alessi & Petry, ; Mishra & Lalumière, , ), relative deprivation (Callan et al ., ; Mishra & Novakowski, ), problem gambling (Alessi & Petry, ; Mishra & Lalumière, ; reviewed in Reynolds, ), procrastination (Schouwenburg & Groenewoud, ), and alcoholism (Petry, ; reviewed in Reynolds, ).…”