The effect of perceived control of temporal discounting of environmental risks.

The present research proposes and tests an explanation for the prior finding that temporal discounting is less pronounced for environmental risks than for other types of risks. We hypothesized that the controllability of the consequences brings about higher discount rates because people tend to believe that temporal delay will increase their amount of control, enabling them to avoid unwanted outcomes, thus lowering their risk judgments. The second step in our line of reasoning was that, if temporal discounting occurs for risks that are controllable, a lack of temporal discounting should be evident for environmental risks that remain uncontrollable despite outcome delays. We hypothesize that the lack of temporal discounting of environmental risks observed in previous studies is caused by the fact that the negative consequences of environmental risks are less controllable than risks in other domains. We predict that, due to the complex nature, the long delays involved and perceived uncertainty of environmental risks people perceive environmental risks as less controllable in comparison with health and monetary risks. We tested our hypotheses by conducting an experiment in which participants, 40 students at the University of Groningen, read brief descriptions of two environmental and two non-environmental risks. In these brief descriptions the temporal delay of the consequences and the controllability of the consequences were varied. After reading the descriptions the participants answered questions aimed to measure, the perceived delay, the perceived controllability, the seriousness, the acceptability and the imaginability of the negative consequences. Because the experimental manipulations failed to affect the participants’ risk judgments our hypotheses remain unsupported. We can not conclude that the perceived controllability of risks affect temporal discount rates and that risks that are considered uncontrollable will have lower discount rates than risks that are considered controllable. And the effect of the different scenarios on the perceived controllability of the participants contradicts our hypothesis that environmental risks are considered to be less controllable than other types of risks. Despite the lack of support for our hypotheses, we provide some recommendations for further research.