A story to tell: the role of narratives in reducing delay discounting for people who strongly discount the future

ABSTRACT

Delay Discounting (DD) or devaluing a future, larger reward in favour of a smaller, more immediate reward, has been linked to negative health behaviours. One intervention that reduces DD is Episodic Future Thinking (EFT). EFT has participants generate cues representing positive future events that correspond to temporal windows during the DD task. The current study examined if incorporating EFT cues into narratives would strengthen effects on DD. One hundred and sixty adults were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk and were randomised to traditional or narrative EFT. Results showed that participants in narrative EFT discounted the future less (p = 0.034) than participants who engaged in traditional EFT. This novel approach to EFT is well grounded in research and theory on the power of narratives to influence behaviour and can open a new window into ways to reduce DD to strengthen engagement in positive choices.

KEYWORDS:

• Delay discounting
• episodic future thinking
• narrative theory
• decision-making‌

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Alyssa Button for her assistance in scoring narratives for coherence.

Disclosure statement

WKB is a principal of HealthSim, LLC; Notifius, LLC; BEAM Diagnostics, Inc.; and a partner for Red 5 Group, LLC. In addition, he serves on the scientific advisory board for Sober Grid, Inc.; Ria Health; US WorldMeds, LLC; and is a consultant for Alkermes, Inc. and Nektar Therapeutics. The other authors have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by Grant UH3DK109543 with Drs. Epstein and Bickel as co-PIs; NIH National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.