The opening paragraph is a poor choice, it gives no more information than the title. Here’s a suggested summary:
Two studies by Daniel Read at Warwick Business School found no evidence of hyperbolic discounting. Both studies offered participants a choice of two rewards some weeks later with the greater reward one week later than the lesser, then offered the choice of the same rewards at the same time points after a few weeks. For greater realism, subjects in first study (Nstudent = 128) believed they had a chance of getting the reward, and subjects in the second study (N = 201) believed they had either a chance or a certainty of getting it. In both studies, patience was equally likely to increase or decrease over time, whereas hyperbolic discounting predicts a decrease.
Why not quote the abstract of the original paper? It is, after all, the authors’ best attempt at accurately summarizing their results and hooking the reader:
Hyperbolic discounting of delayed rewards has been proposed as an underlying cause of the failure to stick to plans to forego one’s immediate desires, such as the plan to diet, wake up early, or quit taking heroin. We conducted two tests of inconsistent planning in which respondents made at least two choices between a smaller–sooner (SS) and larger–later (LL) amount of money, one several weeks before SS would be received, and one immediately before. Hyperbolic discounting predicts that there would be more choices of SS as it became more proximate—and, equivalently, that among those who change their mind, “impatient shifts” (LL-to-SS) will be more common than “patient shifts” (SS-to-LL). We find no evidence for this, however, and in our studies shifts in both directions were equally likely. We propose that some of the evidence cited on behalf of hyperbolic discounting can be attributed to qualitatively different psychological mechanisms.
Edited the post to only quote the opening paragraph.
The opening paragraph is a poor choice, it gives no more information than the title. Here’s a suggested summary:
Why not quote the abstract of the original paper? It is, after all, the authors’ best attempt at accurately summarizing their results and hooking the reader: