More Later: Delay of Gratification and Thought About the Future in Children.

Patrick Burns,Patrick A O’Connor,Teresa Mccormack,Cristina Atance

doi:10.1111/cdev.13521

Patrick Burns, Patrick A O’Connor + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13521

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Abstract

We investigated whether individual differences in future time perception and the detail with which future events are imagined are related to children's delay of gratification. We administered a delay choice task (real rewards), a delay discounting task (hypothetical rewards), a novel future time perception measure, an episodic future thinking (EFT) interview and IQ measures to a sample of 7- to 11-year-olds (N=132) drawn from a urban predominately white population in N. Ireland. We found a strong correlation between delay choice and delay discounting. Future time perception and EFT were related to delay discounting, however only the relation with future time perception survived controlling for age and IQ. Children who showed greater compression of future time periods were the steepest discounters.

Highlights

We investigated whether individual differences in future time perception and the detail with which future events are imagined are related to children’s delay of gratification
This study was the first to examine the relations between future time perception, episodic future thinking (EFT) and delay of gratification in children, with delay of gratification measured using both real and hypothetical rewards
We found evidence that children’s performance on the delay discounting task was related to their future time perception, consistent with theoretical claims regarding the link between future time perception and delay of gratification (Kim & Zauberman, 2009, 2019)

Summary

Introduction

We investigated whether individual differences in future time perception and the detail with which future events are imagined are related to children’s delay of gratification. People often face decisions that require striking a balance between an immediate reward and delayed consequences, such as whether to put this month’s pay bonus into a pension fund or spend it on a shopping trip Decisions of this sort are called intertemporal choices and research has shown that broadly speaking, when faced with such decisions, many people tend to sharply discount future rewards in favor of immediate gratification (Frederick, Loewenstein, & O’Donoghue, 2002). We outline the case for hypothesizing that individual differences in future time perception and EFT skills will be associated with children’s intertemporal choice, before going on to describe the details of this study.

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