Temporal discounting and criminal thinking: understanding cognitive processes to align services.

Temporal discounting is an indicator of impulsivity that has consistently been found to be associated with risky behaviors such as substance abuse and compulsive gambling. Yet, although criminal acts are clearly risky choice behaviors, no study has examined temporal discounting in the criminal attitudes and behaviors of adult offenders. Yet, such investigations have potential to understand the cognitive processes that underlie various criminal patterns of thinking and may help distinguish between high and low risk offenders. Therefore, the current study endeavored to fill this gap in the literature using 146 male inmates within 5 months of release. Results found that temporal discounting is correlated with reactive criminal thinking but was not correlated with proactive criminal thinking. In addition, inmates with higher rates of incarceration were also more likely to have higher rates of temporal discounting. Results shed light on the different cognitive processes that may underlie different styles of criminal thinking as well as potential differences in the discounting rates depending on history of incarcerations. This finding has implications for service delivery in criminal justice settings as those with reactive criminal thinking may benefit from specialized treatments for temporal discounting.

Now for Me, Later for Us? Effects of Group Context on Temporal Discounting.

Delayed rewards are less valuable than immediate rewards. This well-established finding has focused almost entirely on individual outcomes. However, are delayed rewards similarly discounted if they are shared by a group? The current article reports on three experiments exploring the effect of group context on delay discounting. Results indicate that discount rates of individual and group rewards were highly correlated, but that respondents were more willing to wait (decreased discounting) for shared outcomes than for individual outcomes. An explanatory model is proposed suggesting that decreased discount rates in group contexts may be due to the way the effects of both delay and social discounting are combined. That is, in a group context, a person values both a future reward (discounted by delay) and a present reward to another person (discounted by the social distance between them). The results are explained by a combined discount function containing a delay factor and a factor representing the social distance between the decision maker and group members. Practical implications of the fact that shared consequences can increase individual self-control are also discussed.

Hyperbolic discounting of delayed social interaction.

The temporal discounting literature has demonstrated that the loss in value for delayed outcomes is most accurately modeled using a hyperbolic discounting equation. The hyperbolic-shaped function not only describes the shape of discounting for monetary outcomes, but also for other tangibles, such as alcohol, candy, CDs, erotica, cigarettes, cocaine, books, and DVDs. Furthermore, this hyperbolic shape has important theoretical implications. Despite the broad list of outcomes that are hyperbolically discounted, one class of outcomes has only recently received attention: social interactions. For the present study, we used standard binary-choice discounting procedures to explore the function that most accurately describes the change in value of delayed social interactions. The results from the present study suggest that, for 93 participants, the same equations (exponential, hyperbolic, and hyperboloid) used to describe the discounting of nonsocial commodities also describe the relation between delay and the value of social interaction. Similar to previous findings for nonsocial outcomes, the hyperbolic-shaped models provide a fit to the data superior to that of the exponential model.

Effect of delay and social distance on the perceived value of social interaction.

Temporal discounting is a process by which the perceived value of an outcome decreases as delay increases. Social discounting is a process by which the perceived value of an outcome decreases as the social distance between the decision-maker and recipient increases. Both temporal and social discounting are well established for monetary outcomes. However, little is known regarding the effect of delay-to-occurrence or increased social distance on the perceived value of social interactions. The current study demonstrates that the decrease in perceived value for delayed social interactions is well described by the same hyperbola-like function used for monetary outcomes and that the rate of discounting decreases (indicating increased preference for larger, more delayed outcomes) as social distance increases. Conceptualizing the current discounting procedure as entailing both potential gains and losses, suggest that under certain circumstances, higher discount rates may not reflect increased preference.

Commodity specific rates of temporal discounting: does metabolic function underlie differences in rates of discounting?

Discounting rates vary as a function of commodity type. Previous studies suggest five potential characteristics of the commodity that could explain these differences: type of reinforcer (primary or secondary), if the commodity is perishable, if the commodity is satiable, if the commodity can be directly consumed, and immediacy of consumption. This paper suggests that these characteristics may best be viewed as related to a more fundamental characteristic: metabolic processing. In order to explore the possibility that metabolic processing underlies changes in discount rates, the difference in discounting between food, money, music CDs, DVDs, and books are compared. Music CDs, DVDs, and books share many characteristics in common with food, including gaining value through a physiological process, but are not directly metabolized. Results are consistent with previous findings of commodity specific discount rates and show that metabolic function plays a role in determining discount rates with those commodities that are metabolized being discounted at a higher rate. These results are interpreted as evidence that the discount rate for different commodities lies along a continuum with those that serve an exchange function rather than a direct function (money) anchoring the low end and those that serve a direct metabolic function capping the high end (food, alcohol, drugs).

Teaching pigeons to commit base-rate neglect.

Whereas humans display base-rate neglect in a behavioral analogue of the base-rate problem, pigeons have been shown to behave optimally in a comparable task, appropriately weighting base-rate and case-cue information. Previous studies have shown that prior experience may interfere with optimal decisions for human subjects, a result consistent with the position that poor and illogical decisions often follow from the misapplication of learned rules. The present study shows that pigeons will also display base-rate neglect if given extensive pretraining with informative case cues. Two experiments with pigeons, in a matching-to-sample procedure designed to mimic the classic base-rate problem, show that pigeons display base-rate neglect after extensive pretraining with the matching task.