Human's choices in situations of time-based diminishing returns.
People leave growing work faster when the escape move also erases that work—schedule design alone teaches long-term thinking.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team sat 6 college students at a computer. Two buttons lived on the screen.
Pressing the left button started a progressive schedule: each payoff needed 5 more clicks than the last.
Pressing the right button gave a fixed 20-click payoff, but it also reset the left button back to the easy start.
No one told the students the reset rule. The game ran for 45 minutes while the computer logged every switch.
What they found
Players jumped to the fixed button sooner when that move erased the growing work on the left.
Without the reset, they rode the progressive schedule longer and earned less.
The schedule itself, not a spoken rule, pushed smarter long-term choices.
How this fits with other research
Steege et al. (1989) saw humans pick what pays the most overall. Tantam et al. (1993) add the twist: people also jump when a choice erases future work.
Eisler (1984) showed pigeons chase the richer key even if it hurts total reward—melioration. The human adults in D’s lab did the opposite; they maximized. Species and verbal ability may explain the gap.
Madden et al. (2003) later used time-short games and found humans switch to safe fixed delays when time is ample. D’s reset effect is a close cousin: both show people weigh future labor, not just future pay.
Why it matters
You can build “reset” moves into token boards or response chains. Let a client trade a fixed task to wipe a rising requirement and you may see quicker, smoother transitions. Watch the switch point; it tells you the learner senses long-term effort, even without words.
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Add a RESET option: let the learner do one 10-step task to wipe a climbing token board and restart low.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Three experiments examined adult humans' choices in situations with contrasting short-term and long-term consequences. Subjects were given repeated choices between two time-based schedules of points exchangeable for money: a fixed schedule and a progressive schedule that began at 0 s and increased by 5 s with each point delivered by that schedule. Under "reset" conditions, choosing the fixed schedule not only produced a point but it also reset the requirements of the progressive schedule to 0 s. In the first two experiments, reset conditions alternated with "no-reset" conditions, in which progressive-schedule requirements were independent of fixed-schedule choices. Experiment 1 entailed choices between a progressive-interval schedule and a fixed-interval schedule, the duration of which varied across conditions. Switching from the progressive- to the fixed-interval schedule was systematically related to fixed-interval size in 4 of 8 subjects, and in all subjects occurred consistently sooner in the progressive-schedule sequence under reset than under no-reset procedures. The latter result was replicated in a second experiment, in which choices between progressive- and fixed-interval schedules were compared with choices between progressive- and fixed-time schedules. In Experiment 3, switching patterns under reset conditions were unrelated to variations in intertrial interval. In none of the experiments did orderly choice patterns depend on verbal descriptions of the contingencies or on schedule-controlled response patterns in the presence of the chosen schedules. The overall pattern of results indicates control of choices by temporarily remote consequences, and is consistent with versions of optimality theory that address performance in situations of diminishing returns.
Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 1993 · doi:10.1901/jeab.1993.59-445