mind & bodyWikipedia
People often take a smaller reward now over a bigger one later, a tendency called present bias
Present bias is the tendency to give extra weight to rewards and costs that arrive soon, compared with those further away. In a trade-off, people often choose a smaller payment today over a larger one later, and they overvalue immediate pleasures while underweighting long-term consequences. In behavioural economics it is closely tied to hyperbolic discounting, where the value of a future reward drops steeply over short delays and then flattens out over longer ones. That shape means preferences can flip as the moment of choice gets closer. Researchers use present bias as one measure of self-control.
Our sense of value shrinks sharply for rewards that are only a little way off, so immediate options look disproportionately attractive. The same delay matters less when both options are far in the future, which is why people will plan confidently for next year but change their minds when next week arrives. Automatic savings and commitment devices work by removing the choice at the moment of temptation.
Present bias helps explain procrastination, under-saving and overspending, even among people who sincerely want to plan ahead. Knowing it exists makes it easier to design savings plans and commitments that work with human tendencies.
In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus has his crew tie him to the mast so he can hear the Sirens without steering toward them, an early example of binding your future self. Automatic pension enrolment uses the same logic.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · text CC BY-SA 4.0
Illustrative photo · Dan TA Eisenberg, James MacKillop, Meera Modi, Joshua Beauc…, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
