Why We Go for Instant Gratification

We choose the short-term option, even if it is not the better choice.

Chocolate now or chocolate later, after you have lost weight? In a new research, 78 participants were asked to make decisions involving short- and long-term rewards. Those who were informed about fictive outcomes—what they could have got, had they made the opposite choice—were more than twice as likely to go for the quick reward than those who weren’t given this ‘what if’ information. The results suggest more information doesn’t necessarily lead to better choices. The more people know about the short-term gratification they have to give up, the less likely they are to make choices that would result in benefits down the road. In real-life situations, it’s often small decisions, such as eating healthy foods everyday, that add up to a bigger goal with long-term benefits, such as losing weight. The experiments mimicked these everyday dilemmas, with participants completing 250 trials of a decision-making task. In each trial, they were asked to pick one of two options, one of which awarded more points than the other in the short-term. But choosing the ‘quick reward’ made both options worth fewer points in the next trial. Subjects could actually rack up more points if they chose the ‘long-term option’, which awards fewer points immediately, but makes the options go up in value in each subsequent trial. But no, they chose chocolate now.