Читать книгу The Psychology of Environmental Law - Arden Rowell - Страница 32

Valuing goods through time triggers the possibility of investment. This is particularly true for valuing monetary or monetized goods: Money has a time value because a dollar today can be invested and made to grow. The process of “discounting” quantifies this time value (Heal, 1999). Conventionally, for instance, a 5% discount rate indicates that decision makers believe that a dollar can be expected to grow 5% in value over the coming year. Because money has a time value, people may reasonably value an immediate dollar over a dollar they get next year.

The fact that the environmental impacts of many actions are latent, occurring long after the behavior that caused them, can significantly affect the value people place on them (Revesz, 1999; Rowell, 2010). In the United States, regulators generally address the timing of environmental and other policy impacts via the practice of discounting (Sunstein & Rowell, 2007; Rowell, 2010). This practice allows economists and regulators to account for the time value of money (Heal, 1999). Economists and regulators routinely discount future environmental impacts after monetizing them on the basis of people’s willingness to pay money to protect them (Sunstein & Rowell, 2007).

Unfortunately, a number of cognitive distortions affect individuals’ perceptions and understanding of future value, leading people to routinely exhibit a constellation of phenomena known as “hyperbolic discounting,” “time inconsistency,” and “present bias.” These phenomena affect how people value future environmental goods and harms, especially when the possibilities of future environmental impacts are being weighed against immediate actions or immediate costs.

For instance, people’s discount rates in most instances are “hyperbolic”—that is, they decline as the temporal period increases (Frederick et al., 2002; Laibson, 1997). They might prefer $1 today to $2 a week from now, yet prefer $2 in a year plus a week from now to $1 in a year. As we discuss further below, this creates problems of time inconsistency—preferences that shift depending upon when they are elicited. But it also means that individuals’ valuation of money or monetized goods through time diverges substantially from the valuation by economists of the same goods over the same period. Time-inconsistent preferences mean that when you ask people to value an environmental good can affect what valuations you get.

Thus, it can generate troublesome inconsistencies—even mistakes—when policy makers build their environmental policies on valuations generated by members of the public without being careful to identify in what time frame, exactly, the environmental good or harm is being valued (Rowell, 2010). This is particularly important where, as is often the case in the United States, environmental policy is being informed by monetized cost-benefit analysis. Because money has a time value, time-indeterminacy (where there is no particular time signature attached to a cost or benefit) undermines the ability of the analysis to coherently quantify the value of the underlying good (Rowell 2010, 2014).

Relatedly, people’s preferences often exhibit inconsistency when comparing immediate choices over delayed choices. One common way to understand hyperbolic discounting is to think of it as a form of “present bias,” where people attach a special premium to instant gratification (O’Donoghue & Rabin, 1999; Frederick et al., 2002), and thus will work particularly hard to avoid immediate injury. For example, Liberman and Trope (1998) found that when students were offered a choice of doing an interesting but hard assignment or a boring but easy one, they chose the easy, boring task if they were asked to decide immediately but chose the hard, interesting one if deciding for the future. These inconsistencies are exacerbated with longer latency periods between the decision and its impact: The longer the wait, the more people devalue the impact, and the more inconsistent they get (Thaler, 1991). This hints that as environmental effects become more distant from the people and behaviors that generate them, those impacts might affect behavior less and less.

All of these distortions exist simultaneously not only with one another but also with the other effects we have discussed, including loss aversion and failures in affective forecasting. In principle, of course, such phenomena could at least partially offset each other. Imagine that we think global warming is relatively unconcerning because present bias leads us to hyperbolically discount future harms, and imagine that our loss aversion makes us less willing to inconvenience ourselves now on the chance of avoiding that future, since it’s an uncertain loss that not only might not happen, but might not happen to us. If so, then perhaps a failure of affective forecasting could serve as a corrective measure, making us take more steps to avoid that bad future than we otherwise would because we wrongly overestimate the degree to which that future will make us miserable. In short, while the temporally induced biases cause us to underprepare for bad events, perhaps the temporally induced emotional exaggeration of hedonic forecasting might sometimes cause us to overprepare.

It is very tempting to dismiss these interactions among heuristics and biases, hoping that they will balance out on net, leaving people close enough in the end to the cognitively “right” place. But it seems a bit convenient to believe that they would cancel each other out in anything close to an optimal fashion, and there is certainly no evidence for it. Instead, determining the impacts of the combination of such effects should be a priority for psychological science, with further experimental and psychological research designed to tease apart the multiple and interactive impacts of these heuristics and biases. We, of course, would be especially happy to see such research as it specifically applies to the environmental context. In the absence of such research, though, basic research into figuring out ways to avoid suffering from biases in the first place, or designing debiasing techniques to mitigate their impact, would obviously also be useful.