Hyperbolic Discounting
Richard Herrnstein · 1961
"Given two similar rewards, humans overwhelmingly prefer the one that arrives sooner. Our brains aggressively 'discount' the value of rewards the further they are in the future."
If I offer you $100 today or $110 tomorrow, you will likely wait for tomorrow. But if I offer you $100 today or $110 in a year, you will almost certainly take the $100 today. Your brain discounts the future value because the future is uncertain.
This makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective. For a caveman, immediate calories (eating the berry now) were vastly superior to future calories (planting a farm), because the caveman might be eaten by a tiger tomorrow. The problem is that our modern world requires long-term planning (saving for retirement), which our brains are fundamentally wired to hate.
Why did Hyperbolic Discounting evolve in human psychology?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Hyperbolic DiscountingBehavioral Scientist
Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises
"People systematically seek out, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm their existing beliefs, while ignoring or discounting evidence that contradicts them — making it one of the most pervasive and hardest-to-correct biases because it operates on what evidence gets noticed in the first place, not just how it's judged afterward."