Abstract
Delaying gratification is hard, yet predictive of important life outcomes, such as academic achievement and physical health. Prominent theories focus on the role of self-control, hypersensitivity to immediate rewards, and the cost of time spent waiting. However, delaying gratification may also require trust in people delivering future rewards as promised. To test the role of social trust, participants were presented with character vignettes and faces that varied in trustworthiness, and then choose between hypothetical smaller immediate or larger delayed rewards from those characters. Across two experiments, participants were less willing to wait for delayed rewards from less trustworthy characters, and perceived trustworthiness predicted willingness to delay gratification. These findings provide the first demonstration of a causal role for social trust in willingness to delay gratification, independent of other relevant factors, such as self-control or reward history. Thus, delaying gratification requires choosing not only a later reward, but a reward that is potentially less likely to be delivered, when there is doubt about the person promising it. Implications of this work include the need to revise prominent theories of delay of gratification, and new directions for interventions with populations characterized by impulsivity.
Highlights
IntroductionEveryone sometimes struggles to hold out for delayed rewards, but certain populations face particular difficulties, including addicts, criminals, obese individuals, depressed individuals, adolescents, and children (Wulfert et al, 2002; Hongwanishkul et al, 2005; Johnson et al, 2007; Anokhin et al, 2011; Casey et al, 2011)
Discounted value (DV) was calculated at each delay (DV = $5/indifference point) and a hyperbolic discounting function was fit to all DVs using non-linear least squares: DV = 1/(1 + k × delay), where k is the unknown discounting parameter
This work complements prior correlational work, which suggested a link between trust and delaying gratification but did not establish causality (Mischel, 1961; Harris and Madden, 2002), and prior experimental work, which suggested that trust could influence delaying gratification but did not manipulate trust independent of rewards that can influence self-control (Mahrer, 1956; Kidd et al, 2012)
Summary
Everyone sometimes struggles to hold out for delayed rewards, but certain populations face particular difficulties, including addicts, criminals, obese individuals, depressed individuals, adolescents, and children (Wulfert et al, 2002; Hongwanishkul et al, 2005; Johnson et al, 2007; Anokhin et al, 2011; Casey et al, 2011). The ability to delay gratification in childhood predicts important later life outcomes. The ability to resist a desirable immediate treat in favor of a larger delayed one during preschool predicts higher SAT scores and better social competence in adolescence (Mischel et al, 1989; Shoda et al, 1990), and lower obesity rates and substance abuse in adulthood (Ayduk et al, 2000; Schlam et al, 2013). The tendency to treat future rewards as worth less than immediate rewards may lead to undesirable consequences, both for the individual (e.g., lack of personal savings in case of emergency), and for society at large (e.g., insufficient long term investments in science and technology)
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