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I've not gotten any good at writing descriptions since I first made my tumblr and by god I'm not about to start now.


www.in-mutual-weirdness.tumblr.com

belarius
@belarius
Seaglass
@Seaglass asked:

Goes hard having a cohost ad for your published research. Also, as a layman who reread the abstract a few times, seems like neat stuff!

Thanks! This was a very fun project to get involved in (the original idea was undertaken as an undergraduate thesis by the first author), although getting it published had a lot more twists and turns than originally expected.

The core phenomenon being studied is delay discounting, which is very intuitive in its most general terms. Most people would agree: Money now is better than money later, so much so that most people will accept less money now over more money later, at least to some degree. In other words, it's as though valuable outcomes have their value discounted by being delayed until far into the future. Hence, "delay discounting."

What's a lot more surprising is what one discovers when digging into this:

  1. Most people have a pretty stable idea of how much of a discount is appropriate for a given delay. If you thing $50 today > $100 in a month, you'll probably feel the same way tomorrow.
  2. This tradeoff between delay and discount seems to follow a pretty simply mathematical function. This "discounting function" is generally held to be an approximately hyperbolic curve that is controlled by a single number, the "discounting rate." That's interesting! If a simple equation does a good job of describing an intuition that I have, I'm inclined to think that's saying something pretty fundamental about how my mind works.
  3. If you ask different people, you'll quickly discover that people have wildly different discounting rates. Me personally, I'll take $100 in a month over $50 right now any day of the week, but I know people who think that's not relatable at all. Some folks have a very long-term orientation, others are very much living in the moment.
  4. What sort of discounting rate a person displays turns out to be predictive of a whole lot of other opinions and behaviors, which is especially important in a clinical perspective. If you want to understand how people make decisions around topics like investment, or adhering to a medical protocol, or setting and meeting milestones, this is a really useful thing to measure.

So why do this study? Well the problem is that to estimate someone's discounting rate with any precision, you have to ask their opinions about a bunch of different delays and a bunch of different value comparisons. Even the most efficient surveys that try to capture this routinely ask a person's opinion over several dozen scenarios, which takes a while, and is boring, and feels very artificial because the stakes are all hypothetical.

We wanted to see if we could keep the task short and also gamify it to make it more engaging. If we can get good measures of this decision making factor from participants who were motivated and who reported that they didn't hate the task, there's a lot more potential to bring this tool to bear in clinical settings, especially with children. Making the task into a game is just more fun! We really wanted to help researchers and clinicians get better data from participants who were also having an good time.

Weirdly, a big hurdle to getting this published was providing an example of the sort of thing participants saw that was deemed to be "copyright acceptable" by the journal (which releases the articles open-access under a CC license). The above image, for example, ended up requiring seven different sources for its assets!

So let this be a lesson! You can definitely do science using RPG Maker, Twine, or Ren'Py, but keep meticulous track of where all your sprites came from! You may need literal receipts!


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