The Discounting Curve

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There's been some work done by Hal Hirschfield showing that if you show people, for example, virtual reality age-progressed versions of their own face, then they are more willing to save. But also you point out that people are wildly irrational. Like there's the people who would rather have a $5,000 vacation than a $10,000 watt of cash. Yeah, there's some interesting situations where the discounting curve gets a bit funky.

One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember the past, but also conjure up possible futures that haven’t yet happened. This simple ability underlies our capability to organize socially and make contracts with other people. Today’s guest, psychologist Adam Bulley, argues that it’s the primary feature that makes us recognizably human, as he argues in the new book The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight (with Thomas Suddendorf and Jonathan Redshaw).

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Adam Bulley received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Queensland. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre and School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, and the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

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