Present Bias and Everyday Self‐Control Failures: A Day Reconstruction Study

Abstract

Everyday life is full of self-control problems. The economist's favorite explanation for self-control problems is present bias. This paper tests whether experimentally elicited present bias predicts self-control problems in everyday life. We measure present bias by using a standard incentivized delay discounting task and everyday self-control by using the day reconstruction method (DRM). Because this is the first study to measure everyday self-control by using the DRM, we also validate the method by showing that its data replicate key results from the seminal Everyday Temptation Study. We find that present bias does not predict everyday self-control. This points to a distinction between decreasing impatience (as measured in delay discounting tasks) and visceral influences (as occurring in everyday life) as determinants of self-control problems. We argue that decision making research can benefit from the DRM as a cost-effective tool that complements lab and field experiments to better understand economic preference measures and their correlates in everyday life decision making.

Self-Control, Financial Well-Being, and Motivated Reasoning : Essays in Behavioral Finance

“…Although the sample correlation may be lower than the 'true correlation' (Dang et al, 2020), this indicates that the measures were, in the best case, weakly correlated. The same pattern of weak correlation between self-reported and behavioral measures of self-control have been observed in other datasets as well (Delaney & Lades, 2017;Saunders et al, 2018). The underlying reason for the low correlation could be one of many.…”

Measuring Decreasing and Increasing Impatience

“…This finding indicates that decreasing impatience is not the only driver of time-inconsistent behavior and related selfcontrol problems. Several other studies also found no association between decreasing impatience and selfcontrol problems in daily life (Tanaka et al 2010 andDelaney andLades 2017). Yet, others have documented a correlation between the degree of decreasing impatience and behavioral and demographic variables (Burks et al 2009(Burks et al , 2012Courtemanche et al 2015;Meier and Sprenger 2010).…”

Informing behavioural policies with data from everyday life

“…Their participants enacted 17% of the desires despite resistance attempts. The study by Delaney and Lades (2017) used the DRM to replicate most of the findings presented by Hofmann et al (2012) and showed that participants enact more than 30% of the desires despite resistance attempts. This study also showed that the most typical behavioural economic measure of self-control, namely present bias as measured using a financial inter-temporal choice task, is not significantly correlated with any aspect of self-control in everyday life.…”

“…2 Naturalistic monitoring also allows for a direct measurement of what people want in their everyday lives and whether they get it. For example, Hofmann et al (2012) and Delaney and Lades (2017) provide detailed accounts of everyday desires and their satisfaction. Preference satisfaction approaches have historically been used by many economists to guide welfare evaluations, and data from everyday life can inform us as to whether people satisfy their short-term preferences or not.…”