Impatience and grades: Delay-discount rates correlate negatively with college GPA

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Impatience and grades: Delay-discount rates correlate negatively with college GPA Although we professors may not care to admit it, for many college students most of the rewards of academic success are rather remote in time. The rewards of studying for an exam may be days or weeks away. The career-related rewards of earning a good grade point average (GPA) may be years away. It is perhaps common sense that students who are more future-oriented should perform better in college than those who are less so. In this paper we test this prediction by examining the relationship between the rate at which a person discounts future monetary rewards and college academic performance as measured by GPA. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayDelay-discounting refers to the reduction in the present value of a future reward as the delay to that reward is increased. The discount rate determines the steepness of this reduction in value with delay, such that the larger the rate, the more the person discounts the future, and the less value future rewards (or costs) should have in current decisions. A person with a discount rate of zero would not be sensitive to delay, and would value future and immediate rewards equally. A person with a high discount rate would place little value on future rewards. According to the delay-discounting model of impulsiveness (Ainslie, 1975;1992;Rachlin & Green, 1972), as the discount rate increases, people should also become more susceptible to making impulsive decisions (c.f., Strotz, 1956;Winston & Woodbury, 1991). Thus, this model predicts that college students with higher discount rates should tend to place less weight on the future in current decisions, and should be more impulsive than those with lower rates. Consequently, we predict that discount rates and college GPA should be negatively correlated.To examine the relationship between GPA and discount rates, we obtained college GPA and SAT scores for students at two liberal arts colleges for whom discount rates had been estimated in previous studies (Kirby, 1997;1998;Kirby & Santiesteban, 2002 This phenomenon can be modeled using hyperbolic discount functions, which typically provide a better fit to empirical data than do exponential functions in which the discount rate itself is insensitive to delay. One hyperbolic function, which has been shown to fit animal and human discounting data quite well, is the following (Mazur, 1987):where V is the present value of a reward of amount A that i...

Academic motivation mediates the influence of temporal discounting on academic achievement during adolescence

“…It seems unlikely that discounting behaviour, as was examined in this study, could predict a large component of variance in a variable that is influenced by so many other factors. Nonetheless, the growing number of studies finding a relationship between discounting behaviour and academic achievement indicate that discounting behaviour is a small but consistent influence on academic success (Kirby, et al, 2005;Silva & Gross, 2004). Furthermore, our finding of a significant association in our adolescent sample between levels of temporal discounting and academic performance confirms that this influence is present both in adolescents of secondary school age as well as in the older samples, consisting of college students, examined in these previous studies.…”

“…Nevertheless, this is, as Kirby et al (2005) have noted, still a considerable proportion when all other factors that can influence both discounting and academic achievement are considered.…”

“…A classic study, by Mischel, Shoda and Rodriguez (1989) demonstrated that children who were able to delay gratification at the age of four, achieved better academically during adolescence than their less patient peers. Kirby, Winston and Santiesteban (2005) used a delay discounting task to investigate the relationship between the discount rates and grade point averages (GPA) of undergraduate college students. They found that GPA was significantly correlated with discount rates, with grades decreasing as less weight was placed on future rewards.…”

Relation Between Time Perspective and Delay Discounting: A Literature Review

“…There is clear evidence from multiple studies that higher intelligence is associated with lower delay discounting (meta-analysis by Shamosh & Gray, 2008), and also that discount rate for real, delayed monetary rewards is reliably negatively correlated with college GPA in undergraduates (i.e., lower discounting rates are correlated with higher GPAs), and the relation remains reliable after controlling for SAT scores (Kirby, Winston, & Santiesteban, 2005). Compatible with these results, Harrison et al (2002) found in a sample of Danish participants that individuals with longer investments in education had substantially lower discount rates.…”

Beyond the Shadow of a Trait: Understanding Discounting Through Item-Level Analysis of Personality Scales

“…Gatchalian, & Bickel, 2007). Furthermore, research indicates that discount rates are negatively correlated with college GPA (Kirby, Winston, & Santiesteban, 2005), long-term financial strategies and/or savings (Joireman, Sprott, & Spangenberg, 2005), performance in a single-player prisoner's dilemma game (Harris & Madden, 2002;Yi, Johnson, & Bickel, 2005), frequency of cooperative choices on group tasks/activities (Critchfield & Atteberry, 2003), and lower levels of risky-choice behavior (Chesson et al, 2006;Dixon, Marley, & Jacobs, 2003;Odum, Madden, Badger, & Bickel, 2000;Petry, 2001b). The breadth of real-world behaviors that differ across individual discount rates highlights the usefulness of the discounting concept in understanding behavioral differences.…”