Predicting Hunger: The Effects of Appetite and Delay on Choice.

Preferences often fluctuate as a result of transient changes in hunger and other visceral states. When current decisions have delayed consequences, the preferences that should be relevant are those that will prevail when the consequences occur. However, consistent with the notion of an intrapersonal empathy gap (Loewenstein, 1996) we find that an individual's current state of appetite has a significant effect on choices that apply to the future. Participants in our study made advance choices between healthy and unhealthy snacks (i.e., fruit and junk food) that they would receive in 1 week when they were either hungry (late in the afternoon) or satisfied (immediately after lunch). In 1 week, at the appointed time, they made an immediate choice, an opportunity to change their advance choice. Our main predictions were strongly confirmed. First, advance choices were influenced by current hunger as well as future hunger: hungry participants chose more unhealthy snacks than did satisfied ones. Second, participants were dynamically inconsistent: they chose far more unhealthy snacks for immediate choice than for advance choice. An additional hypothesis related to gender differences was also confirmed. Copyright 1998 Academic Press.

[1]  Matthew Rabin,et al.  Incentives for Procrastinators , 1999 .

[2]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  Mixing virtue and vice: combining the immediacy effect and the diversification heuristic , 1999 .

[3]  M. Conner,et al.  Eating Sweet Snacks: Gender Differences in Attitudes and Behaviour , 1997, Appetite.

[4]  Daniel S. Nagin,et al.  The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Expectations of Sexual Forcefulness , 1997 .

[5]  L. Ross,et al.  Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. , 1981 .

[6]  J. March.  Bounded rationality, ambiguity, and the engineering of choice , 1978 .

[7]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  Anomalies in Intertemporal Choice: Evidence and an Interpretation , 1992 .

[8]  R J HERRNSTEIN,et al.  Relative and absolute strength of response as a function of frequency of reinforcement. , 1961, Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior.

[9]  G. Loewenstein.  Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior , 1996 .

[10]  David I. Laibson,et al.  Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting , 1997 .

[11]  Daniel Read,et al.  Enduring pain for money: decisions based on the perception and memory of pain , 1999 .

[12]  D. Kahneman,et al.  Back to Bentham? Explorations of experience utility , 1997 .

[13]  J. Easterbrook.  The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior. , 1959, Psychological review.

[14]  G. Ainslie.  Specious reward: a behavioral theory of impulsiveness and impulse control. , 1975, Psychological bulletin.

[15]  M. Ross.  Relation of Implicit Theories to the Construction of Personal Histories , 1989 .

[16]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  Wouldn't it be nice? Predicting future feelings. , 1999 .

[17]  G. A. Miller,et al.  Book Review Nisbett, R. , & Ross, L.Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment.Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. , 1982 .

[18]  J. Elster,et al.  Choice Over Time , 1992 .

[19]  M Ross,et al.  Women's theories of menstruation and biases in recall of menstrual symptoms. , 1989, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[20]  Gordon C. Winston.  Addiction and backsliding: A theory of compulsive consumption , 1980 .

[21]  R. Herrnstein,et al.  Preference Reversals Due to Myopic Discounting of Delayed Reward , 1995 .

[22]  Casey B. Mulligan,et al.  The Endogenous Determination of Time Preference , 1997 .

[23]  K. Kirby,et al.  Bidding on the Future: Evidence Against Normative Discounting of Delayed Rewards , 1997 .

[24]  George R. Goethals,et al.  The Perception of Consistency in Attitudes. , 1973 .

[25]  J. Elster.  Ulysses And The Sirens , 1979 .

[26]  Robin M. Hogarth,et al.  Insights in decision making : a tribute to Hillel J. Einhorn , 1990 .

[27]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  A Bias in the Prediction of Tastes , 1995 .

[28]  Daniel Kahneman,et al.  Predicting a changing taste: Do people know what they will like? , 1992 .

[29]  G. Ainslie.  Picoeconomics: The Strategic Interaction of Successive Motivational States within the Person , 1992 .

[30]  J. E. Mazur.  An adjusting procedure for studying delayed reinforcement. , 1987 .

[31]  C. Harvey.  The reasonableness of non-constant discounting , 1994 .

[32]  Thomas C. Schelling,et al.  Self-Command in Practice, in Policy, and in a Theory of Rational Choice , 1984 .

[33]  R. Pollak,et al.  SECOND-BEST NATIONAL SAVING AND GAME-EQUILIBRIUM GROWTH , 1980 .

[34]  Howard Rachlin,et al.  Self-control: Beyond commitment. , 1995 .

[35]  J. E. Mazur,et al.  On the functions relating delay, reinforcer value, and behavior , 1988, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[36]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  Diversification bias: Explaining the discrepancy in variety seeking between combined and separated choices , 1995 .

[37]  R. H. Strotz.  Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization , 1955 .

[38]  R. Thaler.  Some empirical evidence on dynamic inconsistency , 1981 .