Many of us have a general tendency towards impatience. This means we overweight the importance of the present over the future. It isn’t challenging to think of examples of this. People consume calories that their future selves will regret. They drink and smoke now gaining modest pleasure. In return, they will suffer massive pain later as a consequence. They often even know this. But things make us impatient. How could we, deliberately or not, go about creating impatience.
Strange Title
There are many papers that investigate what factors generate more impatience. One such paper goes by a fantastic title. “Bikinis Instigate Generalized Impatience In Intertemporal Choice”. (I’m a big fan of interesting hooks. Marketing academics should use them more. This title does make you think. Mostly, ‘what are they talking about?’ Yet you want to find out. It is a good headline.)
The authors suggest that “exposure to “hot stimuli” may instigate general impatience in intertemporal choice”, (Van den Bergh, Dewitte, and Warlop, 2008, page 86). Hot stimuli being those that generate strong sensory-based reactions in us. For example, stimuli related to sex, food, drugs.
Creating Impatience In Young Heterosexual Men
The authors consider what drives impatience in heterosexual men. Their theory is that hot stimuli drive impatience beyond the actual area to which the stimulus relates. They showed the young men pictures of clothed women in sexually suggestive poses. They found that the men’s financial discount rates increased. The young men valued the present much more relative to the future in a financial decision after looking at the pictures of the women. The discount rates were compared to those of young men who saw a neutral landscape stimulus.
The authors repeated the studies to rule out alternative explanations. For example, that the presence of people of any gender, or in any pose, in a picture induces impatience.
They also investigated who was most impacted by the effect. Reassuringly those most sensitive to rewards were the most impacted. Finally, they suggested feelings of being deprived heighten the effect.
Creating Impatience
The idea of impatience generated by sexual cues transferring to financial decisions is interesting, if controversial. I still have questions. Still, whatever the paper actually covered is largely immaterial. The title alone justified publication for me.
For more on time and decisions see here, here, and here.
Read: Bram Van den Bergh, Siegfried Dewitte, and Luk Warlop (2008), Bikinis Instigate Generalized Impatience In Intermtemporal Choice, Journal of Consumer Research, 35 (1) Pages 85-97