Episodic Future Thinking Only Reduces Delay Discounting When Future Events Involve the Self

Abstract

Vividly imagining personally relevant, future episodes (episodic future thinking) reduces delay discounting, with potential to provide many applied benefits. It is not clear whether the events imagined must involve the self, or whether vividly imagining future events that will happen to another person would also reduce delay discounting. In the current study, two groups of students wrote about future events, we then cued them to vividly imagine these future events while making delay-amount trade-off decisions (e.g., would you choose $500 now or $1000 in one year?). One group imagined future events happening to themselves, and another group to a specific person they knew. We compared discounting to a control condition where participants were simply instructed to “choose.” Only the group that imagined personally relevant, future events demonstrated reduced delay discounting. This suggests that episodic future thinking more effectively reduces delay discounting when future events happen to the self rather than another person. The group that imagined personally relevant future events were not more able to report the experimental hypotheses suggesting that this difference was not primarily driven by demand characteristics.