Recent Experience Affects Delay Discounting: Evidence across Temporal Framing, Signs, and Magnitudes
Counterbalance the order of delay-discounting tasks—recent experience with dates or larger amounts skews later choices.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Willis-Moore et al. (2024) asked adults to pick between smaller-sooner or larger-later money amounts.
The team shuffled the order of three kinds of tasks: date-framed, large-magnitude, and standard.
They wanted to know if the task you just finished changes the way you discount the next one.
What they found
People who first did date-framed or big-money tasks picked more impulsive options later.
The order alone shifted discounting; the same person looked more impulsive or more patient depending on what came before.
How this fits with other research
Parmenter (1999) saw no magnitude effect in pigeons: big or small grain, delay sensitivity stayed flat.
The new human data seem opposite, but species and procedure differ. Birds worked for food in repeated trials; humans chose once per amount.
Green et al. (2014) also found amount did not bend the discount curve, yet they tested losses in a fixed order. Willis-Moore shows the order itself is the hidden variable, reconciling the old "no-effect" results.
Horner-Johnson et al. (2002) used the same discounting family and proved hypothetical money works like real cash, so you can copy the order-balancing trick without paying participants.
Why it matters
If you run delay-discounting probes with clients, rotate the blocks across sessions. A big-money or calendar-warm-up can tilt later choices, so counterbalancing keeps assessment clean. One simple fix: swap task order for every other participant or session.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Delay discounting, the decrease in outcome value as a function of delay to receipt, is an extensive area of research. How delays are framed (i.e., temporal framing), as well as the sign and magnitude of an outcome, produce important effects on the degree to which outcomes are discounted. Here, we examined how recent experience (i.e., order of presentation) modifies these well-known findings. Experiment 1 examined the effects of temporal framing across gains and losses. Regardless of outcome sign, the order of task presentation affected the effect of temporal framing. In particular, when typical delay frames (e.g., 1 week) preceded delays framed as actual dates (e.g., February 15), discounting was less in the date-framed task. However, when dates were followed by the delay frame, there was no difference in the degree of discounting. The experience of date-framed delays persisted or carried over to the delay-framed task. Experiment 2 examined recent experience and the magnitude effect. In particular, $10 and $100 were discounted similarly between-subjects when it was the first task completed. However, once participants completed the second magnitude task, the magnitude effect was present both within-subjects and across subjects. Furthermore, $10 was discounted more steeply when it followed $100, and $100 was discounted less steeply when it followed $10. The impact of recent experience on delay discounting has important implications for understanding mechanisms that may contribute to delay discounting. Recent experience should be considered when designing delay discounting experiments as well as when implementing interventions to reduce steep delay discounting.
Perspectives on Behavior Science, 2024 · doi:10.1007/s40614-024-00412-6