BazermanMoore

The Impact of Temporal Differences
When Emotion and Cognition Collide 87
One way to describe the behavior produced by internal conflicts is by applying the economic
concept of discounting, which states that any choice that involves a tradeoff between
current and future benefits should discount the future to some extent. For
example, a can of your favorite soda should be more valuable to you tonight than if you
were to receive it ten years from now, if for no other reason than you might not be
around to enjoy it in ten years. A rational decision maker would discount the future
using exponential discounting, which means discounting each future time period by the
same percentage. Say, for instance, that your chance of death is about 1 percent per
year. You might then discount the value of the soda by 1 percent for a delay of one year.
If you had been willing to pay $1 to receive it immediately, you would only be willing to
pay $0.99 now in order to guarantee delivery a year from now. To guarantee delivery in
ten years, you would be willing to pay $1.99 10 , or about $0.90.
By contrast, self-control problems such as procrastination, laziness, and addiction
can produce choices that reflect hyperbolic discounting. The intuition behind this
theory, first formally employed by Laibson (1994), is quite simple. Relative to the
present time period, we view all gains and losses in the future to be worth less than they
would be in the present. Returning to the soda example, a soft drink would be worth
subjectively more to you today than it would be tomorrow or ayearfromnow.Note
that the difference between getting it in 365 days or 366 days seems miniscule, while
the same one-day delay between today and tomorrow is likely to matter much more. As
O’Donoghue and Rabin (1999) put it, we are biased toward the present.
Milkman, Rogers, and Bazerman (2007) examined the temporal component of the
conflict between the ‘‘want’’ self and the ‘‘should’’ self in the context of movie rentals.
They found that when people are ordering movies that they will receive days later from
their online DVD rental service, they focus more on what they think they should see
(such as documentaries and art films). In contrast, once the movies arrive, the movies
that they want to see (such as comedies and action movies) are more likely than the
‘‘should’’ movies to wind up in the DVD player. As a result, ‘‘should’’ movies stay in
customers’ homes without being played significantly longer than ‘‘want’’ movies. Essentially,
when customers are making decisions about the future, they focus on what they
should do. But when making decisions in the present, they are more likely to do what
they want to do.
The same researchers (Rogers, Milkman, & Bazerman, 2007) examined ordering
choices in the context of an online grocery delivery service, in which customers place their
orders online, and the order arrives within a few days. In general, as the time between the
order and the requested delivery increases, customers spend a higher percentage of their
order on ‘‘should’’ items (such as vegetables) than on ‘‘want’’ items (such as ice cream).
Finally, Rogers and Bazerman (2008) explore the support that citizens have for
policies that pit what they think they should support versus what they want to support.
An example of this conflict is a gas tax, which most people do not want, yet believe that
they should support. Rogers and Bazerman (2008) find that support for such ‘‘should’’
policies goes up significantly if the policy will be implemented in the future rather than
immediately.