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[link] Prepared to wait? New research challenges the idea that we favour small rewards now over bigger later
http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2012/07/prepared-to-wait-new-research.html
The old idea that we make decisions like rational agents has given way over the last few decades to a more realistic, psychologically informed picture that recognises the biases and mental short-cuts that sway our thinking. Supposedly one of these is hyperbolic discounting - our tendency to place disproportionate value on immediate rewards, whilst progressively undervaluing distant rewards the further in the future they stand. But not so fast, say Daniel Read at Warwick Business School and his colleagues with a new paper that fails to find any evidence for the phenomenon.
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Comments (18)
Original paper.
This is the kind of thing which makes me wonder about a community norm of taking psychological research (which may be badly designed or prove less than it seems to) very seriously.
It's not just a community norm, big chunks of the sequences seem to be built on small amounts of recent research.
Do you have examples in mind? I'd very much like them - those would be highly valuable places to double-check assumptions.
It's definitely a good idea to be skeptical. There is definitely some badly-designed research out there, and some that shows less than it claims to. The best way to deal with that is to read the original papers and make sure the studies were adequately performed, although this doesn't entirely solve the issue (see: publication bias).
It would be really nice if studies had a sort of thoroughness check list at the top of the paper next to the abstract clearly stating sample size, sampling process, number of peer reviewers, study methodology(double-blind, panel etc), and any other relevant information to the papers validity. If some sort of crude standardization could even occur within specific fields it would make cross-study comparison much easier. Or what if papers could be published online in a format inviting public criticism and community concerns would be forced to be answered to by authors.
This already happens in some cases. PLoS One, for example, publishes open-access entirely online and invites community criticism:
http://www.plosone.org/static/information.action
(Sorry, I've yet to figure out how to link things and suchlike; can HTML be used here?)
One issue with just allowing anyone to comment on a paper though is a high proportion of misinformed or ignorant people who can hijack the discussion. LW gets round this very well with its judicious gardening, and other sites do this too, so perhaps it's not as big an issue as I'm making it out to be. Unmoderated comment forums tend to turn into slimepits though.
And even just reading the abstracts is already a huge step forward for epistemic hygiene because science reporting and journalism can be so damn shoddy (besides, I regularly find that the abstracts are easier to read and understand than their popularizations).
I generally agree. I have an aversion to just reading abstracts because it doesn't let you get at the nitty-gritty of how exactly the studies were performed, but it's way better than just reading the news reports - and not everyone has full-text access to studies anyway.
The Economist recently had an article about how sitting in wobbly furniture makes people crave "emotional stability." They also mention a study finding that people sitting in chairs that lean to the left reported more liberal opinions.
http://www.economist.com/node/21558553
As far as I can tell they are completely serious.
See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/8om/does_hyperbolic_discounting_really_exist/
Hypothesis: perhaps "money" is not sufficient reward to trigger hyperbolic discounting. (The reason behind this could be that you have to buy the actual rewarding thing with your money. Money itself feels kind of abstract.) Most of the stuff I've read about hyperbolic discounting talk about it in the context of dopaminergic rewards.
This could fit with near/far if money is a far mode trigger.
Please do not quote entire articles, it makes lesswrong be ranked lower on search engines. A link and a short summary would be much better.
Is search engine rank really more important than actually having content users value?
I personally prefer seeing a few key extracts, with the interesting parts bolded, and a link if I want to read the whole thing (I agree that just copying the whole article is not that useful, but I don't think rank on google should weight much in that decision).
Edited the post to only quote the opening paragraph.
The opening paragraph is a poor choice, it gives no more information than the title. Here's a suggested summary:
Why not quote the abstract of the original paper? It is, after all, the authors' best attempt at accurately summarizing their results and hooking the reader: