Dataset Information

Improving Self-Control: The Influence of Role Models on Intertemporal Choices.

ABSTRACT: The ability to delay rewards is one of the most useful qualities one may wish to develop. People who possess this quality achieve more successful careers, display better interpersonal skills and are less vulnerable to psychopathology, obesity or addictions. In the present online studies, we investigated the extent to which delay-of-reward behaviors in female participants can be improved by observing others mastering it. We developed an intertemporal choice (IC) paradigm in which participants had to make fictitious choices between sooner smaller rewards and later bigger ones (e.g., $150 in 1 week vs. $170 in 4 weeks). In Study 1 (N = 186), we found that participants who delayed more had higher socioeconomic statuses and were less likely to procrastinate, smoke or develop obesity. In Study 2 (N = 178), we exposed female participants to a role model who, faced with ICs, chose most of the time the delayed option. Results showed that, although participants were only asked to memorize the model's decisions, they tended to choose the delayed option more often after than before exposure to the model. In Study 3 (N = 148), we found that the direction of the influence depended on the model's behavior: our female participants delayed more after having seen a high delay than a low delay model. In Study 4 (N = 370), we confirmed the effect of modeling on ICs in comparison to a control condition and showed that this effect was still significant 3 months after exposure to the model. Altogether, these results speak in favor of a high efficacy of modeling to develop self-control in women.

SUBMITTER: Kedia G

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6688538 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Publications

Improving Self-Control: The Influence of Role Models on Intertemporal Choices.

Kedia Gayannée G Brohmer Hilmar H Scholten Marc M Corcoran Katja K

Frontiers in psychology 20190802

The ability to delay rewards is one of the most useful qualities one may wish to develop. People who possess this quality achieve more successful careers, display better interpersonal skills and are less vulnerable to psychopathology, obesity or addictions. In the present online studies, we investigated the extent to which delay-of-reward behaviors in female participants can be improved by observing others mastering it. We developed an intertemporal choice (IC) paradigm in which participants had ...[more]

PMID: 31428012

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Project description:Classical economic theory contends that the utility of a choice option should be independent of other options. This view is challenged by the attraction effect, in which the relative preference between two options is altered by the addition of a third, asymmetrically dominated option. Here, we leveraged the attraction effect in the context of intertemporal choices to test whether both decisions and reward prediction errors (RPE) in the absence of choice violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives principle. We first demonstrate that intertemporal decision making is prone to the attraction effect in humans. In an independent group of participants, we then investigated how this affects the neural and behavioral valuation of outcomes using a novel intertemporal lottery task and fMRI. Participants' behavioral responses (i.e., satisfaction ratings) were modulated systematically by the attraction effect and this modulation was correlated across participants with the respective change of the RPE signal in the nucleus accumbens. Furthermore, we show that, because exponential and hyperbolic discounting models are unable to account for the attraction effect, recently proposed sequential sampling models might be more appropriate to describe intertemporal choices. Our findings demonstrate for the first time that the attraction effect modulates subjective valuation even in the absence of choice. The findings also challenge the prospect of using neuroscientific methods to measure utility in a context-free manner and have important implications for theories of reinforcement learning and delay discounting.Significance statementMany theories of value-based decision making assume that people first assess the attractiveness of each option independently of each other and then pick the option with the highest subjective value. The attraction effect, however, shows that adding a new option to a choice set can change the relative value of the existing options, which is a violation of the independence principle. Using an intertemporal choice framework, we tested whether such violations also occur when the brain encodes the difference between expected and received rewards (i.e., the reward prediction error). Our results suggest that neither intertemporal choice nor valuation without choice adhere to the independence principle.

Dataset Information

Improving Self-Control: The Influence of Role Models on Intertemporal Choices.

Publications

Improving Self-Control: The Influence of Role Models on Intertemporal Choices.

Similar Datasets

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