ABSTRACT

A large part of our daily activities involves judging the psychological value of time. This study tested a previously less explored aspect about whether people are loss averse for time – i.e. do losses of time loom larger than corresponding gains? Using comparative hedonic judgments, the impact of prospective gains versus losses of time was examined for common contexts like waiting and local travel based on suggestions by typical navigation apps. The magnitude of time was varied without an explicit reference point (experiment 1) and with a clear reference without any overt consequence (experiment 2). The contextual nature of outcome along with magnitude was also manipulated (experiment 3). Prospective gains loomed as larger or equal to losses for low magnitudes while there was a trend of losses to loom larger than gains only for high magnitudes of time. These results weaken the empirical evidence for loss aversion and highlight its magnitude-dependent nature thus presenting a nuanced perspective to the affective psychology of time.

摘要

我们日常活动的很大一部分涉及判断时间的心理价值。这项研究测试了一个以前较少探索的方面，即人们是否对时间有损失厌恶——即时间的损失是否比相应的收益更大？使用比较享乐判断，根据典型导航应用程序的建议，在等待和本地旅行等常见情况下检查了预期收益与时间损失的影响。在没有明确参考点的情况下（实验 1）和没有任何明显后果的明确参考（实验 2），时间的大小是变化的。结果的上下文性质以及量级也被操纵（实验 3）。在低幅度下，预期收益似乎大于或等于损失，而只有在高幅度时间内，损失才会大于收益的趋势。这些结果削弱了损失厌恶的经验证据，并突出了其依赖量级的性质，从而为时间的情感心理提供了一个微妙的视角。