Abstract
People are often characterized as poor savers. Here we examined whether cues associated with earning and saving have differential salience for attention and action. We first modeled earning and saving after positive and negative variants of monetary reinforcement, i.e., gains versus avoiding loss. Despite their equivalent absolute magnitude in a monetary incentive task, colors predicting saving were judged to appear after those that predicted earning in a temporal-order judgment task. This saving posteriority effect also occurred when savings were framed as earnings that come slightly later. Colors predicting savings, whether they acquired either negative or positive value, persisted in their posteriority. An attentional asymmetry away from money-saved relative to money-earned, potentially contributes to decreased everyday salience and future wealth.
Highlights
The temporal priority for earnings over savings persisted when earning and savings were both modeled after positive reinforcement but framed as gains or in the near future. These variants of reinforcement and the manipulation of temporal framing yielded a priority of earning over saving. This highlights that there are many potential mechanisms that can have a common influence on savings posteriority, reducing the moment-to-moment attentional salience of saving
Through association with earning and saving, acquire value and attentional salience relative to colors associated with neutral payouts
Individual differences in temporal salience were associated with the magnitude of payout in dollars, suggesting increased attentional salience can be translated to behavioral preference and money earned versus saved
Summary
The temporal priority for earnings over savings persisted when earning and savings were both modeled after positive reinforcement but framed as gains or in the near future. Through association with earning and saving, acquire value and attentional salience relative to colors associated with neutral payouts.
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