The Impact Of Future Self-continuity On Intertemporal Decision-making

Intertemporal decision-making refers to an individual's decision-making behavior based on weighing the costs and profits and losses that occur at different points in time.In recent years,an influencing factor based on time dimension in intertemporal decision-making,that is,future self-continuity,has attracted more and more researchers' attention.Future self-continuity is an individual's assessment of the degree of correlation between its current self and future self,mainly an individual's perception and knowledge of the future self.Researchers have found that the individual's understanding of future self-continuity has an important impact on the individual's decision-making behaviors related to the time dimension(such as time discounts).The Consideration of Future Consequences are closely related to future self-continuity,and both have an impact on intertemporal decisions based on the time dimension.This research takes “self-continuity” as the starting point,and based on the dual processing model,and refers to previous scholars' literature in the field of future self-continuity and intertemporal decision-making.It considers future self-continuity,the Consideration of Future Consequence,and pre-commitment Research in several aspects,through three studies,verify the hypotheses and research models proposed in this article.Experiment 1 used questionnaires to measure,which using the future selfcontinuity scale and the intertemporal decision-making task questionnaire to initially explore the correlation between future self-continuity and intertemporal decisionmaking.A total of 140 college students from Shanghai Normal University participated in the questionnaire and received 124 valid questionnaires.Experiment 2 explores the causality between future self-continuity,the Consideration of future Consequence,and discount rates of intertemporal decision-making.This study is designed with single factor(future self-continuity: high future self-continuity,low future self-continuity)and between-subjects design was used.A total of 110 experimental data were selected,and experimental manipulation of future self-continuity was conducted.In experiment 3,the variable of pre-commitment was added to explore the relationship between it and future self-continuity,the Consideration of future Consequence,and discount rate of inter-temporal decision-making,to verify the regulatory effect of pre-commitment.The two-factor test room design using 2(future self-continuity: high future self-continuity,low future self-continuity)× 2(pre-commitment: with pre-commitment,without precommitment).A total of 138 subjects were used,and the pre-commitment was manipulated before the formal experiment.The results show that:(1)the level of future self-continuity of an individual affects intertemporal decision-making.Individuals with high future self-continuity prefer the delayed option and a lower time discount rate;individuals with low future selfcontinuity prefer the near-term option and a higher time discount rate.(2)The Consideration of Future Consequence play a mediating role in future self-continuity and time discounts.Individuals with high future self-continuity have higher levels of the Consideration of future considerations,prefer delay options,and have lower time discount rates.(3)Pre-commitment to regulate the future between self-continuity and time discount.When an individual makes a prior commitment,the level of consideration of future Consequence is significantly improved,and future selfcontinuity no longer has a predictive effect on future results consideration.