ABSTRACT

Until recently, philosophers have supposed that people exhibit a first-person hedonic bias toward the future, but that their non-hedonic and third-person preferences are time-neutral. Recent empirical work, however, suggests that our preferences are more nuanced. There is evidence that third-person preferences exhibit time-neutrality only when the individual with respect to whom we have preferences—the preference target—is a random stranger about whom we know nothing. The simulation hypothesis proposes that third-person preferences mirror first-person preferences when we can simulate the mental states of the preference target. There is also evidence that we prefer negative hedonic events to be in our past only when we view events as not under our control. When we perceive it to be within our power to mitigate the badness of future events, we are first-person negatively hedonically past-biased. This is the mitigation hypothesis. We distinguish two versions of the mitigation hypothesis, the squirrelling version and the heuristic version. We ran a study which tested the simulation hypothesis and aimed to determine whether the squirrelling or the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis enjoys more empirical support. We found support for the simulation hypothesis and the heuristic version of the mitigation hypothesis.

摘要

直到最近，哲学家们还假设人们对未来表现出第一人称的享乐偏见，但他们的非享乐和第三人称偏好与时间无关。然而，最近的实证研究表明，我们的偏好更加微妙。有证据表明，只有当我们对其有偏好的个人——偏好目标——是一个我们一无所知的随机陌生人时，第三人称偏好才会表现出时间中立性。该模拟假设 建议当我们可以模拟偏好目标的心理状态时，第三人称偏好反映了第一人称偏好。还有证据表明，只有当我们认为事件不受我们控制时，我们才会更喜欢消极的享乐事件发生在我们的过去。当我们认为减轻未来事件的不利影响是在我们的能力范围内时，我们会以第一人称消极享乐过去偏见。这就是 缓解假设。我们区分缓解假设的两个版本， 松鼠版本 和 启发式版本. 我们进行了一项研究，测试了模拟假设，旨在确定缓解假设的松鼠式或启发式版本是否享有更多的经验支持。我们发现了对模拟假设和缓解假设的启发式版本的支持。