Do natural landscapes reduce future discounting in humans?

Do natural landscapes reduce future discounting in humans?

An important barrier to enduring behavioural change is the human tendency to discount the future. Drawing on evolutionary theories of life history and biophilia, this study investigates whether exposure to natural versus urban landscapes affects people's temporal discount rates. The results of three studies, two laboratory experiments and a field study reveal that individual discount rates are ...

Discounting an uncertain future

The objective of this paper is to determine the socially optimal discount rate for public investment projects that entail costs and benefits in the very long run. We suppose that there is an exogenous process for the growth of consumption per capita, which is stochastic. We first evaluate the determinants of the discount rate for a specific horizon when the representative agent has a recursive ...

Future anhedonia and time discounting

The temporal location of an event influences the way people mentally represent that event. We suggest (a) that such representational differences can produce an affective forecasting error that we call future anhedonia, which is the belief that hedonic states will be less intense in the future than in the present, and (b) that future anhedonia plays a role in time discounting (i.e., the tendency...

Myopic discounting of future rewards after medial orbitofrontal damage in humans.

Choices are often intertemporal, requiring tradeoff of short-term and long-term outcomes. In such contexts, humans may prefer small rewards delivered immediately to larger rewards delivered after a delay, reflecting temporal discounting (TD) of delayed outcomes. The medial orbitofrontal cortex (mOFC) is consistently activated during intertemporal choice, yet its role remains unclear. Here, pati...

Perspectives on Discounting the Future