| Summary: | Recent research has
shown that risk and reward are positively correlated in many environments, and
that people have internalized this association as a “risk-reward heuristic”:
when making choices based on incomplete information, people infer probabilities
from payoffs and vice-versa, and these inferences shape their decisions. We
extend this work by examining people’s expectations about another fundamental
trade-off --- that between monetary reward and delay. In 2 experiments (total N
= 670), we adapted a paradigm previously used to demonstrate the risk-reward
heuristic. We presented participants with intertemporal choice tasks in which
either the delayed reward or the length of the delay was obscured. Participants
inferred larger rewards for longer stated delays, and longer delays for larger
stated rewards; these inferences also predicted people’s willingness to take
the delayed option. In exploratory analyses, we found that older participants
inferred longer delays and smaller rewards than did younger ones. All of these
results replicated in 2 large-scale pre-registered studies with participants
from a different population (total N = 2138). Our results suggest that people
expect intertemporal choice tasks to offer a trade-off between delay and
reward, and differ in their expectations about this trade-off. This
“delay-reward heuristic” offers a new perspective on existing models of
intertemporal choice and provides new insights into unexplained and systematic
individual differences in the willingness to delay gratification.
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