Hedonic impacts of gains versus losses of time: are we loss averse?

ABSTRACT

A large part of our daily activities involves judging the psychological value of time. This study tested a previously less explored aspect about whether people are loss averse for time – i.e. do losses of time loom larger than corresponding gains? Using comparative hedonic judgments, the impact of prospective gains versus losses of time was examined for common contexts like waiting and local travel based on suggestions by typical navigation apps. The magnitude of time was varied without an explicit reference point (experiment 1) and with a clear reference without any overt consequence (experiment 2). The contextual nature of outcome along with magnitude was also manipulated (experiment 3). Prospective gains loomed as larger or equal to losses for low magnitudes while there was a trend of losses to loom larger than gains only for high magnitudes of time. These results weaken the empirical evidence for loss aversion and highlight its magnitude-dependent nature thus presenting a nuanced perspective to the affective psychology of time.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychology of time
• emotion
• gains versus losses
• loss aversion
• magnitude

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers and the handling editor for suggestions. Jonathan Baron had provided helpful feedback on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on the OSF project page at https://osf.io/ks8yb/ [DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/KS8YB].

Notes

1 Effect size from Mukherjee et al. (2017, study 2) which used a Wilcoxon signed-rank test is d = .965.

2 JASP Team (2020). JASP (Version 0.14.1)[Computer software].

3 Rabin (2000) had noted that invoking risk aversion to explain aversion towards small amounts of stakes would be too large to generalize for large stakes.