Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Recent research has identified intertemporal impulsivity as a critical cognitive variable for explaining the autocatalyticnature of socioeconomic status (SES). But how exactly this relationship transpires has not been clearly identified. Wepresent results from a novel experimental study, demonstrating that decision-makers’ time preference becomes morepresent-focused when they experience budgetary overruns in a sequential decision-making task. On the basis of theseresults, we hypothesize that steep intertemporal discounting in low SES individuals may arise as a rational metacognitiveadaptation to persistently experiencing planning and control failures in long-term plans. Consilient evidence in support ofthis hypothesis and downstream policy implications are briefly discussed.