Using Visualization to Counteract Discounting

Cordone, Peter

Etd

Using Visualization to Counteract Discounting

Public Deposited

When it comes to decisions between payoffs sooner or later in time, people tend to over discount the later reward and choose the sooner option. Discounting can manifest itself in decisions regarding finance, health, and the environment, is ubiquitous, and transcends cultures. The quality of life and life expectancy can be negatively impacted, especially in later years, as the negative consequence of myopic decisions accumulate over time. As of 2023, forty-three percent of Americans could not pay for a one-thousand-dollar emergency from savings and over half of Americans self-report they are behind on their retirement savings. Intertemporal choice decisions are malleable, and discounting can be counteracted by how attention is focused, and time is represented. Visualization is a powerful tool for influencing these factors. Can visualization be used to reduce discounting in money choice decisions? To test this hypothesis, we visualized Money Earlier or Later (MEL) questions and measured how visualization influenced participants to choose the larger later option. We implemented a single page React application which presented participants with three different treatments of MEL questions; a worded version found in much of the existing literature and a bar chart with and without the horizontal time axis extending past the larger later bar creating space to the right. We found both bar chart visualizations increased the proportion of later choices over the worded with the extended axis bar chart increasing later choices the most. We believe these results can help create bar chart visualizations of intertemporal choice decisions to influence people to choose the larger later option at least one out of eight times more often vs. a worded form.

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