Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Human behavior is plagued by shortsightedness. When faced withtwo options, smaller rewards are often chosen over larger rewards,even when such choices are potentially costly. In threeexperiments, we use big data techniques to examine how suchchoices might be driven by people’s temporal horizons. InExperiment 1, we determine the average distance into the futurepeople talk about in their tweets in order to determine the temporalhorizon of each U.S. state. States with further future horizons hadlower rates of risk taking behavior (smoking, binge drinking) andhigher rates of investment (e.g., education, infrastructure). InExperiment 2, we used an individual’s tweets to establish theirtemporal horizon and found that those with longer temporalhorizons were more willing to wait for larger rewards. InExperiment 3, we were once again able to predict the choicebehaviors of individuals from their tweets, this time showing thatthose with longer future horizons were less likely to take risks. Thefindings help establish a powerful relationship between people’sthoughts about the future and their decisions.