B. Kyu Kim

Memories as Assets: Strategic Memory Protection in Choice over Time

We present five studies supporting our strategic memory protection theory. When people make decisions about experiences to consume over time, they treat their memories of previous experiences as assets to be protected. The first two studies demonstrate that people tend to avoid situations that they believe will threaten their ability to retrieve special (rather than merely pleasant) memories. The next three studies demonstrate that people seek to obtain memory pointers to help them cue special memories at a later time when they anticipate interference from subsequent events. These preferences are driven by peoples lay theories about the importance and difficulty of obtaining and retrieving special memories. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Can Victoria's Secret Change the Future? A Subjective Time Perception Account of Sexual-Cue Effects on Impatience

Sexual cues influence decisions not only about sex, but also about unrelated outcomes such as money. In the presence of sexual cues, individuals are more impatient when making intertemporal monetary tradeoffs, choosing smaller immediate amounts over larger delayed amounts. Previous research has emphasized the power of sexual cues to induce a strong general psychological desire to obtain not only sex-related but all available rewards. In the case of money, that heightened appetite enhances the perceived value of immediate monetary rewards. We propose a different psychological mechanism to explain this effect: Sexual cues induce impatience through their ability to lengthen the perceived temporal distance to delayed rewards. That is, sexual cues make the temporal delay seem subjectively longer, resulting in greater impatience for monetary rewards. We attribute this process to the arousing nature of sexual cues, thus extending findings on arousal and overestimation of elapsed time to the domain of future time perception and intertemporal preferences.

Space, Time, and Intertemporal Preferences

Although subjective judgment of future time plays an important role in a variety of decisions, little is known about the factors that influence such judgments and their implications. Based on a time as distance metaphor and its associated conceptual mapping between space and time, this article demonstrates that spatial distance influences judgment of future time. Participants who consider a longer spatial distance judge the same future time to be longer than those considering a shorter distance. Intertemporal preferences, for which judgment of future delays is a critical factor, also shift with consideration of spatial distance: participants who consider a longer spatial distance also reveal a greater degree of impatience in intertemporal decisions as they perceive a longer delay to future rewards. The current findings support the importance of subjective judgment of future time in intertemporal preferences by introducing a factor that changes time perception without directly changing the value of outcomes.

Controllable objects seem closer.

More and more we interact with other people across varying amounts of geographical distance. What shapes our categorization of a fixed amount of such distance as near or far? Building upon and expanding prior work on the association between spatial distance perception and reachability, we argue that people judge a given geographical distance as subjectively smaller when they can exert control across that distance. Studies 1-4 demonstrate this effect of control on spatial distance judgment in disparate contexts, including political, work, and family domains, and explore implications of such judgments for the downstream judgment of travel time to a location (Study 2). We do not find that ones desire for control moderates these effects (Study 4). Supporting a cognitive association argument, we find evidence that the association between control and distance is bidirectional, with subjective distance influencing perceived controllability (Study 5). Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.