The Hidden-Zero Effect

Splurge on a vacation, or save for retirement? Sleep in late, or get up to exercise? The ability to resist a tempting, immediately available reward in order to obtain a larger delayed reward is the hallmark of self-control, and predicts important life outcomes such as academic achievement (Duckworth Frederick, Loewenstein, & O'Donoghue, 2002), we hypothesized that representing each alternative as a sequence of outcomes, by explicitly referring to the hidden zero in each alternative, would increase participants’ willingness to choose larger delayed rewards over smaller immediate rewards, as they would prefer to choose sequences that appear to improve over time.