Past-future preferences for hedonic goods and the utility of experiential memories
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Date
2022
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Abstract
Recent studies have suggested that while both adults and
children hold past-future hedonic preferences – preferring
painful experiences to be in the past and pleasurable experi ences to lie in the future – these preferences are abandoned
when the quantity of pain or pleasure under consideration is
greater in the past than in the future. We examined whether
such preferences might be affected by the utility people assign
to experiential memories, since the recollection of events can
itself be pleasurable or aversive, and we examined the devel opmental trajectory of the value that people assign to experi ential memories of past painful experiences. Using a task in
which we manipulated hypothetical memory loss in a series of
brief vignettes, we found that for some adults, but not for
children, the disutility attached to the recollection of painful
past events outweighed the disutility of living through future
painful events. Between middle childhood and adulthood,
experiential memory appears to assume a more important
role in determining the value that people assign to past
experiences and in mitigating bias toward the future
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Keywords
Temporal; time; hedonic; preferences; memory; utility