Hyperbolic Discounting with Environmental Outcomes across Time, Space, and Probability
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Hyperbolic Discounting with Environmental Outcomes across Time, Space, and Probability Rebecca J. Sargisson 1
&
Benedikt V. Schöner 1
# Association for Behavior Analysis International 2020
Abstract Environmental discounting is a potentially important research area for climate change mitigation. We aimed to replicate and extend earlier work on the discounting of a negative environmental outcome. We measured ratings of concern, and willingness to act to mitigate, an outcome involving air pollution that would hypothetically affect the garden and drinking water of the participants over psychological distance represented by temporal (1 month, 6 months, and 1, 3, 5, 10, and 80 years), spatial (5, 20, 50, 100, 1000, and 5000 km), and probabilistic (95%, 90%, 50%, 30%, 10%, and 5% likelihood) dimensions. For our data from 224 first-year psychology students, of four potential models (an exponential, simple hyperbolic, and two hyperboloid functions), the Rachlin hyperboloid was the best-fitting model describing ratings of concern and action across all three dimensions. Willingness to act was discounted more steeply than concern across all dimensions. There was little difference in discounting for outcomes described as human-caused rather than natural, except that willingness to act was discounted more steeply than concern for human-caused environmental outcomes compared to natural outcomes across spatial (and, less conclusively, temporal) distance. Presenting values of the three dimensions in random or progressive order had little effect on the results. Our results reflect the often-reported attitudebehavior gap whereby people maintain concern about a negative event over dimensions of psychological distance, but their willingness to act to mitigate the event is lower and more steeply discounted. Keywords Behavioral economics . Environmental psychology . Temporal discounting . Probability discounting . Spatial discounting
Introduction The world’s climate has changed dramatically over the last decades, as human activities drive anthropogenic climate change. Global atmospheric conditions of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) have increased markedly. These increases catalyze the occurrence of global climate hazards. It is clear that human behavior needs to change drastically, yet current trends show that behavior is Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-019-00368-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Rebecca J. Sargisson [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
not changing quickly enough (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC], 2018). In consequence, it is important to understand the barriers to sustainable behavior. As reasons for a lack of public behavior change in response to climate change are wide-ranging, multileveled, and complex (Gifford, 2011), judgmental disc
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