(B)
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,”said Franklin D. Roosevelt. He might have been onto something: research suggests that people are happy to endure a bit more pain, if it means they spend less time waiting for it.
Classical thanes of decision-making suppose that people bring rewards forward and postpone punishments, because we give far-off events less weight. This is called “temporal discounting”. But this theory seems to go out the window when it comes to pain.
One explanation for this is that the anticipation of pain is itself unpleasant, a phenomenon that researchers have appropriately termed “dread”.
To investigate how dread varies with time, Giles Story at University College London, and his colleagues, hooked up 33 volunteers to a device that gave them mild electric shocks. The researchers also presented people with a series of choices between more or less mildly painful shocks, sooner or later.
During every “episode” there was a minimum of two shocks, which could rise to a maximum of 14, but before they were given them, people had to make a choice such as nine extra shocks now or six extra shocks five episodes from now. The number of shocks they received each time was determined by these past choices.
No pain, no gain.
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