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Does Power Reduce Temporal Discounting? Commentary on Joshi and Fast (2013)

Devaluing future outcomes, known as temporal discounting (Frederick, Loewenstein, & O’Donoghue, 2002), hinders one’s ability to act in line with long-term over short-term interests. It is associated with maladaptive behaviors such as smoking (Kirby, Petry, & Bickel, 1999), drug use (Harrison, Lau, & Rutström, 2010), and not saving for retirement (Gubler & Pierce, 2014). Because temporal discounting may affect a variety of behaviors, ranging from exercising to energy consumption (Urminsky & Zauberman, 2015), understanding the factors that influence temporal discounting is critical for researchers in psychology, economics, business, and public policy. Joshi and Fast (2013) provided evidence that increased social power (i.e., control over valued resources; Magee & Galinsky, 2008) reduces temporal discounting. This finding has important applied, theoretical, and empirical implications. First, it implies the potential to mitigate temporal discounting by giving individuals power. Psychological and health-science researchers have thus recently advocated for empowerment as an intervention to improve balancing of longterm and short-term interests in decision making (Gubler & Pierce, 2014; Patton et al., 2016; Urminsky & Zauberman, 2015). Second, this finding informs the theoretical debate on how power affects self-control. Temporal discounting may be thought of as a self-control conflict between having a smaller reward sooner versus having a larger reward later (Frederick et al., 2002; Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989). The approach-inhibition theory of power (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003) posits that high power activates the behavioral approach system, which increases impulsivity and sensitivity to rewards. Therefore, high-power individuals, compared with lowpower individuals, should be more likely to prefer earlier to delayed rewards, and thus show more temporal discounting. In contrast, the social distance theory of power (Magee & Smith, 2013) predicts the reverse, that high-power individuals should show less temporal discounting than low-power individuals. According to the social distance theory, because of their greater independence, high-power individuals feel more psychologically distant from low-power individuals than vice versa. Increased psychological distance has been shown to decrease temporal discounting (e.g., Pronin, Olivola, & Kennedy, 2008), in part by leading individuals to construe situations more abstractly (Trope & Liberman, 2010), which highlights the value of the delayed reward (e.g., Fujita, Trope, Liberman, & Levin-Sagi, 2006). Third, this finding could further current understanding of the self-reinforcing nature of power (Magee & Galinsky, 2008). If having power decreases temporal discounting, such heightened self-control on the part of the powerful may help maintain existing power hierarchies. In a United Nations Development Programme report on poverty reduction, Sheehy-Skeffington and Haushofer (2014) extrapolated from Joshi and Fast’s (2013) finding to suggest that poverty harms one’s chance of long-term success by reducing one’s sense of power and thus one’s self-control. Given the theoretical and real-world significance of this reported effect, it is important to examine its reproducibility. Other published experiments on this topic used similar procedures but produced inconsistent results. Duan, Wu, and Sun (2017) found that power reduced temporal discounting for Chinese participants (Study 1), but this effect was specific to participants of Han ethnicity, and was not found among participants 754219 PSSXXX10.1177/0956797617754219Zhang, SmithDoes Power Reduce Temporal Discounting? commentary2018