Sanford E. DeVoe

You Are How You Eat Fast Food and Impatience

Based on recent advancements in the behavioral priming literature, three experiments investigated how incidental exposure to fast food can induce impatient behaviors and choices outside of the eating domain. We found that even an unconscious exposure to fast-food symbols can automatically increase participants’ reading speed when they are under no time pressure and that thinking about fast food increases preferences for time-saving products while there are potentially many other product dimensions to consider. More strikingly, we found that mere exposure to fast-food symbols reduced people’s willingness to save and led them to prefer immediate gain over greater future return, ultimately harming their economic interest. Thus, the way people eat has far-reaching (often unconscious) influences on behaviors and choices unrelated to eating.

Time is tight: how higher economic value of time increases feelings of time pressure.

The common heuristic association between scarcity and value implies that more valuable things appear scarcer (King, Hicks, & Abdelkhalik, 2009), an effect we show applies to time. In a series of studies we find that both income and wealth, which affect the economic value of time, influence perceived time pressure. Study 1 found that changes in income were associated with changes in perceived time pressure. Studies 2-4 showed that experimentally manipulating times perceived economic value caused greater feelings of time pressure and less patient behavior. Study 5 demonstrated that the relationship between income and time pressure was strengthened when participants were randomly assigned to think about the precise economic value of their time.

Economic evaluation: The effect of money and economics on attitudes about volunteering

Recent research shows that hourly payment affects decisions about time use in ways that disfavor uncompensated activities such as volunteering. This paper extends that argument by showing that the activation of money and economics as aspects of a persons self-concept is one mechanism possibly producing these results. Study 1 showed that employed adults explicitly primed to think about their own time in terms of money were less willing to volunteer compared to those primed to think about another persons time in terms of money, illustrating the importance of the self-concept in the economic evaluation of time. Mediation analyses showed that participants view of themselves as economic evaluators fully accounted for both the effect of the manipulation and variation in prior experience with hourly payment on willingness to volunteer. Study 2 showed the undergraduates supraliminally primed with either money or economic concepts were less willing to volunteer their time. The findings suggest that economic evaluation is one causal mechanism affecting attitudes about time use.

Medium of Exchange Matters What’s Fair for Goods Is Unfair for Money

Organized groups face a fundamental problem of how to distribute resources fairly. We found people view it as less fair to distribute resources equally when the allocated resource invokes the market by being a medium of exchange than when the allocated resource is a good that holds value in use. These differences in fairness can be attributed to being a medium of exchange, and not to other essential properties of money (i.e., being a unit of account or a store of value). These findings suggest that egalitarian outcomes have a greater likelihood of being accepted as fair when the resources being distributed take the form of in-kind goods rather than of cash transfers.

The Stingy Hour: How Accounting for Time Affects Volunteering

These studies examined how the practice of accounting for one’s time—so that work can be billed or charged to specific clients or projects—affects the decision to allocate time to volunteer activities. Using longitudinal data collected from law students transitioning to their first jobs, Study 1 showed that exposure to billing time diminished individuals’ willingness to volunteer, even after controlling for attitudes about volunteering held before entering the workforce as well as the individual’s specific opportunity costs of volunteering time. Studies 2-5 experimentally manipulated billing time and confirmed its causal effect on individuals’ willingness to volunteer and actual volunteering behavior. Study 5 showed that the effect of exposure to billing time on volunteering occurred above and beyond any effects on general self-efficacy or self-determination. Individual differences moderated the effects of billing, such that people who did not value money as much were less affected.

When Is Happiness About How Much You Earn? The Effect of Hourly Payment on the Money—Happiness Connection

The authors argue that the strength of the relationship between income and happiness can be influenced by exposure to organizational practices, such as being paid by the hour, that promote an economic evaluation of time use. Using cross-sectional data from the United States, two studies found that income was more strongly associated with happiness for individuals paid by the hour compared to their non-hourly counterparts. Using panel data from the United Kingdom, Study 3 replicated these results for a multi-item General Health Questionnaire measure of subjective well-being. Study 4 showed that experimentally manipulating the salience of someone’s hourly wage rate caused non-hourly paid participants to evince a stronger connection between income and happiness, similar to those participants paid by the hour. Although there were highly consistent results across multiple studies employing multiple methods, overall the effect size was not large.

Fast Food and Financial Impatience: A Socioecological Approach

We investigated whether the prevalence of fast-food restaurants in the social ecology are associated with greater financial impatience at the national, neighborhood, and individual level. Study 1 shows that the proliferation of fast-food restaurants over the past 3 decades in the developed world was associated with a historic shift in financial impatience, as manifested in precipitously declining household savings rates. Study 2 finds that households saved less when living in neighborhoods with a higher concentration of fast-food restaurants relative to full-service restaurants. With a direct measure of individuals delay discounting preferences, Study 3 confirms that a higher concentration of fast-food restaurants within ones neighborhood is associated with greater financial impatience. In line with a causal relationship, Study 4 reveals that recalling a recent fast-food, as opposed to full-service, dining experience at restaurants within the same neighborhood induced greater delay discounting, which was mediated behaviorally by how quickly participants completed the recall task itself. Finally, Study 5 demonstrates that pedestrians walking down the same urban street exhibited greater delay discounting in their choice of financial reward if they were surveyed in front of a fast-food restaurant, compared to a full-service restaurant. Collectively, these data indicate a link between the prevalence of fast food and financial impatience across multiple levels of analysis, and suggest the plausibility of fast food having a reinforcing effect on financial impatience. The present investigation highlights how the pervasiveness of organizational cues in the everyday social ecology can have a far-ranging influence.

The economic evaluation of time: Organizational causes and individual consequences☆

Abstract People acquire ways of thinking about time partly in and from work organizations, where the control and measurement of time use is a prominent feature of modern management—an inevitable consequence of employees selling their time for money. In this paper, we theorize about the role organizational practices play in promoting an economic evaluation of time and time use—where time is thought of primarily in monetary terms and viewed as a scarce resource that should be used as efficiently as possible. While people usually make decisions about time and money differently, we argue that management practices that make the connection between time and money salient can heighten the economic evaluation of time. We consider both the organizational causes of economic evaluation as well as its personal and societal consequences.

Flextime and Profitability

Despite the well‐documented benefits of flexible work schedules (flextime), generalizable assessments of how flextime influences organizational profitability have proven elusive. Using a unique data set representative of organizations in Canada, we examine the effect of flextime in combination with organizational strategies to predict profitability. Using fixed effects and controlling for prior profitability, we find that flextime increases profitability when implemented within a strategy centered on employees but decreases profitability when implemented within a strategy focused on cost reduction.

Choosing letter grade evaluations: The interaction of students' achievement goals and self-efficacy

We examined how achievement (learning and performance) goals and academic self-efficacy predicted three achievement-related outcomes in a college sample. Self-efficacy tended to moderate the effects of (learning and performance) goals on number of courses taken for a letter grade as well as achievement in letter graded and pass/fail courses. Thus, learning goals better predicted choosing letter grades when self-efficacy was high than when it was low. In contrast, performance goals better predicted choosing letter grades when self-efficacy was low than when it was high. Through their prediction of the choice to receive letter grades these interactions predicted achievement in pass/fail courses. In addition, achievement goals and self-efficacy directly predicted achievement in letter graded courses.