Delay Discounting as a Function of Intrinsic/Extrinsic Religiousness, Religious Fundamentalism, and Regular Church Attendance

ABSTRACT

Delay discounting occurs when the subjective value of an outcome decreases because its delivery is delayed. Previous research has suggested that the rate at which some, but not all, outcomes are discounted varies as a function of regular church attendance. In the present study, 509 participants completed measures of intrinsic religiousness, extrinsic religiousness, religious fundamentalism, and whether they regularly attended church services. They then completed a delay-discounting task involving five outcomes. Although religiousness was not a significant predictor of discounting for all outcomes, participants scoring high in intrinsic religiousness tended to display less delay discounting than participants scoring low. Likewise, participants scoring high in religious fundamentalism tended to display more delay discounting than participants scoring low. These results partially replicate previous ones in showing that the process of discounting may vary as a function of religiousness. The results also provide some direction for those interested in altering how individuals discount.

Keywords:

• delay discounting
• religiousness
• university students

Notes

Equation 1 does assume, however, that the level of discounting is linear between two indifference points, which may not be true.

One potentially interesting question is whether measures of religiousness were related to whether a participant displayed an AUC value of 0. Unfortunately, the data from these individuals have since been deleted and thus this question cannot be presently answered. On the one hand, although one could hypothesize based on previous research that measures of religiousness might be related to how steeply one discounts the outcomes tested in the present study, we had no reason to hypothesize that religiousness would be related to any of the five outcomes tested having no value whatsoever. On the other hand, research (Weatherly, Plumm, & Derenne, 2011) that religiousness may be predictive of AUC values of 0 for certain outcomes (e.g., abortion legislation; legalizing gay marriage). Thus, this possibility cannot be ruled out and remains open to future research.

One could argue that AUC values measure something different (e.g., the overall value of the outcome being discounted) than would be measured by analyzing discounting using a hyperbolic equation (e.g., the rate at which the value of the outcome decreases across increasing delays). While this argument may be correct, analyzing the data using a hyperbolic equation would not have substantially altered the results. For instance, in the present analysis, if a hyperbolic-equation analysis had been employed (with the data first logarithmically transformed to account for positive skew), the only statistical outcome that would have differed was that participants also discounted the outcome of $1,000 more than they did receiving medical treatment.

That result would have also held true even if regular church attendance had been the only predictor variable in the regression models.