Plea Bargaining: A Test of Dual Discounting Preferences for Non-Monetary Losses

Lauren Clatch, Eugene Borgida

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Judgment and decision-making research on discounting suggests that when humans are thinking about gains, they tend to prefer certain and immediate outcomes to uncertain and delayed outcomes. However, discounting has been studied primarily using monetary commodities and, until recently, by testing one feature of the binary forced-choice task at a time: delay, probability, or amount of money received/lost. The present research is the first test of a dual discounting task that combines probability and delay into a single, binary forced-choice task in a non-monetary loss context. The key findings, based on three studies, suggest that delay and probability discounting play a significant role in decisions including non-monetary loss commodities like plea bargaining. Future work should explore the boundary conditions of dual discounting based not only on the nature of the binary choice (probability and delay) but also on the nature of the commodity (amount, valence, and quantifiability).

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1039-1056
Number of pages18
JournalPersonality and social psychology bulletin
Volume47
Issue number7
Early online dateSep 18 2020
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 18 2020

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Keywords

  • decision making
  • delay and probability discounting
  • heuristics
  • plea bargaining

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