Abstract
Judgment and decision-making research on discounting suggests that when humans are thinking about gains, they tend to prefer certain and immediate outcomes to uncertain and delayed outcomes. However, discounting has been studied primarily using monetary commodities and, until recently, by testing one feature of the binary forced-choice task at a time: delay, probability, or amount of money received/lost. The present research is the first test of a dual discounting task that combines probability and delay into a single, binary forced-choice task in a non-monetary loss context. The key findings, based on three studies, suggest that delay and probability discounting play a significant role in decisions including non-monetary loss commodities like plea bargaining. Future work should explore the boundary conditions of dual discounting based not only on the nature of the binary choice (probability and delay) but also on the nature of the commodity (amount, valence, and quantifiability).
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1039-1056 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Journal | Personality and social psychology bulletin |
Volume | 47 |
Issue number | 7 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jul 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Lauren Clatch was supported by a Graduate School Fellowship from the University of Minnesota and a 2017 Grant-in-Aid from the American Psychology-Law Society.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
Keywords
- decision making
- delay and probability discounting
- heuristics
- plea bargaining
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article
- Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't