Abstract
We tend to seek immediate gratification at the expense of long-term reward. In fact, the more distant a reward is from the present moment?the more we tend to discount it. This phenomenon is known as temporal discounting. Engaging in mental time travel plausibly enables subjects to overcome temporal discounting, but it is unclear how, exactly, it does so. In this paper, we develop a framework designed to explain the effects of mental time travel on temporal discounting by showing how the subject?s temporally extended self enables mental time travel to generate appropriate emotions that, in turn, via metacognitive monitoring and control, generate appropriate behaviours. Building on existing approaches we outline an initial framework, involving the concepts of emotion and the temporally extended self, to explain the effects of mental time travel on resisting temptation. We then show that this initial framework has difficulty explaining the effects of mental time travel on a closely related phenomenon, namely, overcoming procrastination. We next argue that, in order to explain these effects, the concept of emotion needs to be refined, and the concept of metacognition needs to be added to the framework: emotions involve an action-readiness component, which, through metacognitive monitoring and control, can enable the subject to resist temptation and overcome procrastination. Finally, we respond to an objection to our account?based on the somatic marker hypothesis?such that metacognition is not necessary to account for the role of emotions in decision-making.
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Notes
Such patients are impaired both in their capacity to remember the events of their personal pasts and in their capacity to imagine the events of their personal futures (e.g., Andelman et al., 2010; Kwan et al., 2010, 2013; Race et al., 2013; Tulving, 1985; but see Hurley et al., 2011; Squire et al., 2010, reviewed in Rosenbaum et al., 2014). This impairment is specific to events of a personal nature, and the patients’ capacity to imagine generic future events (e.g., events involving public figures) appears to be intact (Klein et al., 2002); Szpunar et al., (2014, 2016) have developed a taxonomy of forms of future thought that distinguishes between episodic and semantic forms of prospection. Episodic prospection concerns specific autobiographical events (e.g., a meeting that one plans to attend next week), whereas semantic prospection concerns general or abstract states of the world (e.g., an upcoming election). The dissociation in amnesic patients between personal and impersonal future thought is consistent with this taxonomy.
As noted by Kwan and colleagues, the specific prediction that one makes regarding the behaviour of amnesic patients in intertemporal choice situations will depend on one’s underlying hypothesis about which aspects of future events are imagined. Boyer (2008) has hypothesized that mental time travel enables the subject to imagine future rewards, in which case it should counteract temporal discounting and increase the tendency to choose future rewards. Luhmann and colleagues (Luhmann, 2009; Luhmann et al., 2008), in contrast, have argued that mental time travel enables the subject to anticipate the unpleasantness of waiting for future rewards, in which case engaging in mental time travel should bias one towards choosing immediate rewards. Given Boyer’s view, amnesic patients, being unable to imagine future experiences, should consistently choose the immediate reward. Given Luhmann and colleagues’ view, amnesic patients should consistently choose the future reward. Either way, however, they should adopt a non-temporal decision-making strategy; that is, delay should not have a systematic effect on their choices.
Bechara et al., (2000) review evidence for the somatic marker hypothesis and suggest that emotions may support decision-making without the need of forming any explicit concept of risky choices. This hypothesis is consistent with the idea that emotions may support future decision-making without engaging in mental time travel. We discuss further the somatic marker hypothesis in Sect. 5.
Palombo et al., (2015), for example, found that cueing amnesic patients to imagine future events did not attenuate temporal discounting. The discrepancy between this study and that carried out by Kwan and colleagues may be due to the fact that they employed different cueing procedures. In Kwan and colleagues’ study, subjects generated their own cues (e.g., the subject’s fortieth wedding anniversary), which might refer to existing plans, and they were not asked to imagine doing anything specific in the given scenario. In Palombo and colleagues’ study, in contrast, subjects were required to imagine future events based on cues drawn from a set of standard scenarios (e.g., attending a street fair, going to a bar). It may be that these different types of cue activated different processes, facilitating the use of alternative strategies not based on subjects’ compromised prospection ability in the former study but not the latter.
In Kwan and colleagues’ studies, the delay discounting tasks involved hypothetical monetary rewards. It may be that mental time travel plays no role in this specific type of intertemporal choice; in choices involving relatively small monetary rewards, a purely economic strategy may be sufficient. There is evidence for this suggestion in the literature. Kwan et al., (2013) tell us that one subject with episodic amnesia, D.A., demonstrated temporal discounting rates that were in line with those of healthy controls. Interestingly, D.A. “reported using a strictly economic strategy, specifically estimating inflation and interest rates, but did not expand on how he made his calculations. This strategy capitalized on his premorbid professional background and did not require episodic thought. He did not spontaneously engage in episodic considerations for spending” (2013: 1362).
See Sect. 5 for further discussion on the role of emotions.
Because there are multiple points at which things might go wrong with this process, the framework based on the role of emotions and the temporally extended self generates predictions about how and why failures of self-control might occur. First, the subject might be incapable of imagining the potential consequences of her actions. Patients known as H.M. (Scoville & Milner, 1957) and D.B. (Klein et al., 2002), for example, are unable to imaginatively project themselves into potential personal futures. Second, the subject might fail to identify her present with her future self. Although this sort of failure may be more difficult to document, an example is arguably provided by patients described by Klein (2014, 2015), who, despite being able to mentally travel in time, do not experience the past and future events that they represent as belonging to themselves. Third, a subject might be capable of imagining the consequences of her actions but fail to experience the appropriate emotional response to the imagined consequences. That this is possible is suggested by models of psychopathy, which have focused on deficits in emotion processing, emphasizing, in particular, the inability of psychopathic individuals to experience negative emotions (Patrick, 2007). These paths to failure suggest ways of testing the framework and might be used to guide empirical research on this topic.
On might object that the costs of not procrastinating (e.g., the loss of the minor pleasure that one would obtain by watching a television programme rather than competing an important work-related task) are often low, whereas the costs of procrastinating (e.g., the pain entailed by the harm done to one’s career by one’s failure to complete the important task) are often high. The point, however, is that it feels better to defer costs at the time at which they are deferred. As one chooses whether to complete the work-related task or, instead, to watch the television programme, the choice that one faces is between accepting the pain of doing the task now or deferring it to a later date.
While some definitions (e.g., Silver & Sabini 1981; Andreou, 2007) characterize procrastination as being necessarily irrational, neither ours nor those on which it is modelled do so. Like Stroud (2010), we define procrastination without using normative terms such as rationality; unlike Stroud, we do so not because we think that procrastination might under certain circumstances be rational—we take no stand on this here—but rather because our aim is to provide a purely descriptive framework for understanding how subjects overcome procrastination.
It is not immediately obvious why there should be such an asymmetry between resisting temptation and overcoming procrastination with respect to the motivating force of the emotion triggered by imagining future outcomes; our suspicion is that there is a difference between our satisficing behaviour when it comes to negative experiences and when it comes to positive experiences. In the case of resisting temptation, if we are right, the subject has a negative experience now and therefore acts so as to avoid having a similar negative experience in the future. Since the disvalue of both experiences taken together is greater than the disvalue of the present experience, the subject will tend to act so as to avoid having the future experience. In the case of overcoming procrastination, the subject has a positive experience now and therefore acts so as to have a similar positive experience in the future. The value of both experiences taken together is greater than the value of the present experience, but the value of the present experience may nevertheless be sufficient from the subject’s point of view. To put it bluntly: one will always want to avoid additional pain, but at some point one may have had enough pleasure.
For the sake of simplicity, we assume here and throughout that pleasant emotions are experienced as positive and unpleasant emotions are experienced as negative. In practice, of course, there may be cases where this does not hold.
One may also focus on imagining the event in the future rather than just on the emotion associated with the event, but nonetheless in these cases this will be an event that is emotionally arousing and which involves affect. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing to this possibility.
A further interesting line of research would be to focus on the role of anticipatory emotions in dilemmas of intertemporal choice, and outline the ways in which metacognition relates to this variety of future-oriented emotions.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks for feedback to participants in the Centre for Philosophy of Memory’s internal seminar. This work is supported by the French National Research Agency in the framework of the “Investissements d’avenir” program (ANR-15-IDEX-02) and the Templeton Foundation through Florida State University’s project “The Philosophy and Science of Self-Control” (Prime Award No. 49684, Subaward No. PH2).
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Cosentino, E., McCarroll, C.J. & Michaelian, K. Resisting temptation and overcoming procrastination: The roles of mental time travel and metacognition. Phenom Cogn Sci 21, 791–811 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09836-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-022-09836-4