Meghan Sullivan

speaker

520 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2017 last heard Jun 2017

Meghan Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

No recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Elucidations · Episode 97: Meghan Sullivan discusses time biases · 11 Jun 2017 podcast

Thanks, Matt.

So you have a time bias if you have a preference about when good or bad experiences happen.

So probably the most common example and the one that philosophers, psychologists, and economists are really obsessed with, is near bias.

So a person is near-biased if she prefers uh some experiences over others because they happen sooner rather than further away.

So you might think near bias is a good explanation for why people don't save money for retirement.

Suppose you get a thousand dollar tax return from the IRS and you have a choice between blowing it on a cool vacation in Mexico or putting it in a retirement account where you're not going to be able to withdraw the money for 30 years.

You might reason as follows, if we put the money away, it's going to grow in value.

No, it might double every year.

seven years if the stock market keeps going the way it's going.

So it'd be worth a lot more money.

when you withdraw it, way more than you'd be willing to spend on a Mexican vacation now.

But that's so far away

Temporally.

that you just don't care that much about it and you'd prefer to have the really good experience now.

That's a really common kind of near bias that we're all susceptible of.

Another more interesting kind of time bias, and and this is um one that I focused on a bit in my work, is we tend to care a lot less about both good and bad experiences if they've already happened.

So this is future bias, or sometimes it's called past discounting.

And a really good example of this is imagine you had to have a pretty painful surgery.

Now you've already recovered from it.

You might think you just don't care at all about that surgery anymore, especially if you don't have bad present memories of it.

Showing 1–20 of 520 · page 1 of 26