Abstract
It seems self-evident that people prefer painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experiences to lie in the future. Indeed, it has been claimed that, for hedonic goods, this preference is absolute (Sullivan, 2018). Yet very little is known about the extent to which people demonstrate explicit preferences regarding the temporal location of hedonic experiences, about the developmental trajectory of such preferences, and about whether such preferences are impervious to differences in the quantity of envisaged past and future pain or pleasure. We find consistent evidence that, all else being equal, adults and children aged 7 and over prefer pleasure to lie in the future and pain in the past and believe that other people will, too. They also predict that other people will be happier when pleasure is in the future rather than the past but sadder when pain is in the future rather than the past. Younger children have the same temporal preferences as adults for their own painful experiences, but they prefer their pleasure to lie in the past and do not predict that others' levels of happiness or sadness vary dependent on whether experiences lie in the past or the future. However, from the age of 7, temporal preferences were typically abandoned at the earliest opportunity when the quantity of past pain or pleasure was greater than the quantity located in the future. Past-future preferences for hedonic goods emerge early developmentally but are surprisingly flexible.
Highlights
Imagine being in hospital for painful surgery
Results from the Temporal Preference and Emotion Prediction tasks are reported in Table 1, where they are shown as a proportion of participants who demonstrated temporal location judgments in the expected direction
Results from the Temporal Preference and Emotion Prediction tasks are reported in Table 2, where they are shown as a proportion of participants who demonstrated temporal location preferences in the expected direction
Summary
Imagine being in hospital for painful surgery. You need to be awake during this surgery, so anesthetics are not possible, but patients are given a postoperative drug that causes them to forget the last few hours. You wake up in hospital, unsure of whether you have yet had the operation, and ask for information. The nurse cannot remember whether you are the patient who had the operation yesterday, in which case it lasted 10 h, or the patient who will have the operation tomorrow, in which case it will last 1 h. The philosopher Derek Parfit (1984), who proposed this thought experiment, claims that people will prefer to be the patient who had the 10-hour painful operation yesterday rather than the one who will have the 1-hour painful operation tomorrow. People’s preference for unpleasant experiences to lie in the past and, for pleasant experiences to lie in the future has been described as a temporal bias (Hare, 2007; Sullivan, 2018)
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