Temporal discounting and context: Discounting weights for gains and losses presented in isolation and in combination.

Abstract

The current study compares the judged values of delayed gains and delayed losses presented in isolation and combined. An additive model was used to estimate the subjective values and delay weights for individual participants. In the first set of judgments the delays were in the same range for gains and losses. During the second set of judgments, the range of delays was lengthened for the gains for one group and lengthened for the losses for the other group. The subjective values of the gains and losses were consistent across the two sets of judgments whether isolated or combined but differed for isolated and combined outcomes. The discounting weights differed for gains and losses regardless of whether they were isolated or combined. The shift in the range of the delays provided a test of the impact of context on the discounting weights. Increasing the range of delays for gains changed the discounting weights for gains that were common to both delay ranges. The shift in the delay range for gains also impacted the discounting weights for losses which were not changed. Increasing the delay range for losses changed the delay weights that were common to both the short and long time ranges. Shifting the delay range for losses also impacted the discounting weights for gains. These findings indicated that context theory is an important factor in broadening the understanding of temporal discounting.

Contextual effects in salary satisfaction

“…Psychologists have long known that 'absolute' judgments such as 'tall' or 'short ', 'hot' or 'cold', 'moral' or 'immoral', or 'happy' or 'unhappy' are relative (Helson, 1947(Helson, , 1964Parducci, 1968;Slovic, 1995). Contextual effects occur not only in perception and judgment, but also in choice (Noguchi and Stewart, 2018;Ronayne and Brown, 2017;Wollschlaeger and Diederich, 2020), cognitive effort (Otto and Vassena, 2021), equity (Mellers, 1982(Mellers, , 1986, learning Wedell, 2023a, 2023b), marketing (Arens, 2023), memory (Wedell et al, 2020), similarity (Yearsley et al, 2022), and temporal discounting (Stevenson, 1992(Stevenson, , 2019.…”