Yossarian
11-23-14, 10:36am
How grateful you feel may affect your financial decisions:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/opinion/sunday/with-holiday-shopping-willpower-isnt-enough.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0
Psychologists have long known that negative emotions like anger and fear can alter decisions (often for the worse), but until recently, we haven’t focused on the effects of positive emotions on decision making. The emotion of gratitude, viewed from a cost-benefit perspective, stresses the long-term value of short-term sacrifice (e.g., If I’m grateful to you for a favor, I’ll work hard to repay it and thereby ensure you’ll help me again in the future). Consequently, my colleagues and I suspected that gratitude might also enhance patience and self-control.
To find out, we asked 75 people to recall and describe in writing one of three events: a time they felt grateful, a time they felt amused or a typical day. We next asked them 27 questions of the form “Would you rather have $X now or $Y in Z days?” where Y was always greater than X, and Z varied from days to months.
...
Answers to these questions allowed us to calculate how financially patient people were. As we reported in an article in Psychological Science earlier this year, those feeling neutral (the ones who described their daily routine) demonstrated the usual preference for immediate reward: On average, they viewed receiving $17 now as equivalent to getting $100 in a year. Those feeling happy and amused were similar: On average, they would sacrifice $100 in a year for $18 in the moment.
But those feeling grateful showed almost double the financial patience. They required $30 in the moment to forgo the $100 reward a year from now. What’s more, the amount of patience people possessed was directly tied to how grateful they felt.
I would have held out for the $100, but that's just me.>8)
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/opinion/sunday/with-holiday-shopping-willpower-isnt-enough.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0
Psychologists have long known that negative emotions like anger and fear can alter decisions (often for the worse), but until recently, we haven’t focused on the effects of positive emotions on decision making. The emotion of gratitude, viewed from a cost-benefit perspective, stresses the long-term value of short-term sacrifice (e.g., If I’m grateful to you for a favor, I’ll work hard to repay it and thereby ensure you’ll help me again in the future). Consequently, my colleagues and I suspected that gratitude might also enhance patience and self-control.
To find out, we asked 75 people to recall and describe in writing one of three events: a time they felt grateful, a time they felt amused or a typical day. We next asked them 27 questions of the form “Would you rather have $X now or $Y in Z days?” where Y was always greater than X, and Z varied from days to months.
...
Answers to these questions allowed us to calculate how financially patient people were. As we reported in an article in Psychological Science earlier this year, those feeling neutral (the ones who described their daily routine) demonstrated the usual preference for immediate reward: On average, they viewed receiving $17 now as equivalent to getting $100 in a year. Those feeling happy and amused were similar: On average, they would sacrifice $100 in a year for $18 in the moment.
But those feeling grateful showed almost double the financial patience. They required $30 in the moment to forgo the $100 reward a year from now. What’s more, the amount of patience people possessed was directly tied to how grateful they felt.
I would have held out for the $100, but that's just me.>8)