Two recent studies from the journal Psychological Science offer surprising insights into when and why our brains say, "not so fast."
The first one, from researchers at USC's Marshall School of Business, suggests that power makes people more willing to say no to a cash offered right now, if it means they can get more money later. The behavior under study is called "temporal discounting" -- the tendency for people to prefer a smaller reward to a larger one, if that means they get it now instead of waiting (beyond the point where inflation, etc would wash out any difference in real value) -- we shortchange our future selves. In four experiments, these researchers showed that giving people a temporary boost in power (making them the "boss" in a group activity) made them more willing to wait for more money.
Crazy, right? Doesn't power override inhibitions and whet one's appetite for risk? Yes, say the study's authors, but it also seems to increase people's affinity with their future selves. For one thing, they write, "Power engenders a sense of control and optimism, reducing the uncertainty associated with the future [which is] one of the causes of temporal discounting." Indeed, the effect of power on reward choice was mediated by how close people reported feeling to their future selves in a questionnaire. In a survey study done outside the lab, people who reported feeling more powerful in their daily lives also reported saving a lot more for retirement, even controlling for factors such as income. age, and education.
The second study, by a group of British researchers, finds a mind-body link in inhibitions. When offered a series of gambles, people were more risk averse when they were occasionally prompted to stop making a simple movement that was otherwise part of the experiment (i.e. pressing the spacebar after choosing their wager). It wasn't that people who stopped their thumbs from hitting the space bar stopped gambling altogether. "Occasional motor inhibition reduced monetary risk taking by approximately 10% to 15%," the researchers note. But, the results suggest a general inhibition system in the brain, and, more generally, that inhibition can be enhanced with practice.
