Many fundamental choices in life are intertemporal: they involve trade-offs between sooner and later outcomes. In recent years there has been a surge of interest into how people make intertemporal decisions, given that such decisions are ubiquitous in everyday life and central in domains from substance use to climate change action. While it is clear that people make decisions according to rules, intuitions and habits, they also commonly deliberate over their options, thinking through potential outcomes and reflecting on their own preferences. In this Perspective, we bring to bear recent research into the higher-order capacities that underpin deliberation—particularly those that enable people to think about the future (prospection) and their own thinking (metacognition)—to shed light on intertemporal decision-making. We show how a greater appreciation for these mechanisms of deliberation promises to advance our understanding of intertemporal decision-making and unify a wide range of otherwise disparate choice phenomena.

生活中的许多基本选择都是跨时期的：它们涉及早晚结果之间的权衡。近年来，人们对如何做出跨期决策的兴趣激增，因为此类决策在日常生活中无处不在，并且是从物质使用到气候变化行动等领域的核心。虽然人们显然根据规则、直觉和习惯做出决定，但他们通常也会仔细考虑自己的选择，思考潜在的结果并反思自己的偏好。在本视角中，我们利用最近对支撑深思熟虑的高阶能力的研究——特别是那些使人们能够思考未来（展望）和自己的思维（元认知）的能力——来阐明跨期决策。我们展示了对这些审议机制的更多理解如何有望增进我们对跨期决策的理解，并统一各种不同的选择现象。