Episodic Future Thinking about the Ideal Self Induces Lower Discounting, Leading to a Decreased Tendency toward Cheating

Abstract

Delay discounting refers to a pervasive tendency toward preferring smaller immediate gains over larger future gains. Recent empirical research has shown that episodic future thinking (EFT; i.e., projecting oneself into the future to pre-experience forthcoming events) can reduce the tendency toward discounting. A common tenet of psychological theories of crime is that delinquency results from focusing on short-term gains while failing to consider adequately the longer-term consequences of delinquent behavior. We investigated whether an EFT intervention involving the ideal self could induce lower discounting rates and, as a consequence, reduced delinquency. The results showed that, compared with control participants, participants engaging in EFT, that is, envisaging life events that would be experienced by their ideal selves, exhibited a lower discounting rate in a monetary choice task (Experiments 1 and 2), as well as a decreased tendency to make delinquent choices in imaginary scenarios (Experiment 1) and cheat in a matrix task (Experiment 2). The discounting tendency mediated the relationship between engaging in EFT pertaining to the ideal self and the tendency toward morally questionable behavior (Experiments 1 and 2). The findings of the two experiments indicate that engagement in EFT with a focus on the ideal self is sufficient to induce lower discounting rates, by promoting consideration of distant costs and thus increasing resistance to delinquent involvement and cheating (given the temptation of the immediate benefits that may accrue from such behavior). The current research constitutes an innovative approach to delinquency prevention and the promotion of morality.

Creative Persuasion: A Study on Adversarial Behaviors and Strategies in Phishing Attacks

“…Delaying high rewards resulted in lesser effort (see Figure 7 ). This result clarifies the effect of delay of rewards in discouraging dishonest behaviors (Wu et al, 2017 ). The easier and sooner attackers gain high rewards, the more motivated they would become to apply more effort in designing persuasive phishing emails.…”

“…Like in physical crime, delay in payoffs could affect dishonest behaviors. Individuals indulging in dishonest behaviors have been shown to prefer smaller yet immediate rewards over larger delayed ones (Kirby and Maraković, 1995 ; Frederick et al, 2002 ; Wu et al, 2017 ). We currently do not understand what effects a delay in the rewards has on the effort adversaries exert in their attacks.…”

Imagining Events Alternative to the Present Can Attenuate Delay Discounting

“…In the episodic cue (compared to the standard) task, individuals' preferences shifted towards future rewards, and the reduction of DD rates was associated with the vividness of the imagined future event and with increased functional coupling between the hippocampus and vmPFC and ACC regions associated with reward processing and valuation (Kable and Glimcher, 2007;Peters and Büchel, 2010;Benoit et al, 2011). The effect of episodic cueing on DD is consistently found in healthy individuals (Benoit et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2013;Lin and Epstein, 2014;Bromberg et al, 2017;O'Donnell et al, 2017O'Donnell et al, , 2018Zhang et al, 2018;Bulley et al, 2019), as well as patients with substance abuse disorders (Daniel et al, 2013;Snider et al, 2016), in whom it extends to real-world indices of impulsive choice, such as impulsive drinking or eating (Daniel et al, 2013;Dassen et al, 2016; see also Wu et al, 2017). In contrast, consistent with Peters and Büchel's (2010) finding that episodic cueing effects on DD are conditional upon the imagination of vivid future events, no episodic cueing effect has been observed in amnesic patients with hippocampal damage (Palombo et al, 2014; but see Kwan et al, 2015), who cannot construct detail-rich future events (Race et al, 2011;see also De Luca et al, 2018) to use for decisions.…”

Envisaging Mitigation Action Can Induce Lower Discounting toward Future Environmental Gains and Promote Pro-Environmental Behavior

“…In the mitigation-EFT condition, the participants were asked to write down three future life events associated with mitigation action that they would enact on in the future. Each participant was then instructed to close eyes and to envisage the events s/he had listed as specifically and vividly as possible (such as a specific time of day, the setting and occasion of the events, the persons and objects that would be present during the event) [15,35]. They had 2 min to pre-experience each life event mentally.…”

“…From a psychological approach, the tendency to discount future gains should be a crucial determinant of engaging in climate change mitigation. Prior research on interventions to reduce the discounting tendency suggests that engaging in episodic future thinking (EFT; self-projection of oneself to pre-experiencing future events [9]) can induce individuals to discount the future less [10][11][12][13][14][15]. In this article, we report experimental demonstration that engaging in EFT to pre-experience life events involving mitigation can reduce the tendency to discount future environmental gains and promote the tendency to act pro-environmentally.…”