In Search of Answers

Would you rather receive $11 today or $30 a week from now? A tendency to pick the smaller-but-sooner reward can be revealing: It has been associated with signs of impulsiveness in the domains of eating, sex, and drugs and lower scores on a measure of reflective thinking. A recent paper in Judgment and Decision Making suggests the tendency is also broadly tied to how we make sense of the world.

In a sample of thousands of study participants, those who showed an elevated preference for immediate monetary rewards instead of later, larger payoffs were more likely to give intuitive but wrong answers to word problems and to use suboptimal strategies on decision-making tasks. They also, on average, more strongly endorsed certain ideas, including the beliefs that God exists and that people are clearly definable and predictable. Such individuals tended to use Twitter more frequently than less impulsive choosers and preferred media outlets that other volunteers had rated as less complex. And they were more likely to identify as social (but not fiscal) conservatives.

It's not yet clear what's behind the associations. Favoring easier rewards, the researchers theorize, may translate to a desire for sooner epistemic gratification—"having some kind of answer to satisfy one's curiosity," explains Brown University psychologist Amitai Shenhav, one of the study's authors. Beliefs and media messages that explain events and people in relatively uncomplicated ways could provide such answers.

That is not to suggest that intuitive ideas must be incorrect, Shenhav notes. Also, many factors, such as our social circles and backgrounds, shape our beliefs and preferences, and the correlations in this study were relatively small. As University of Waterloo psychologist Derek Koehler, who also researches analytic thinking, puts it: "There are plenty of patient people who believe in God and impatient people who do not."