The psychological consequence of thinking about time in terms of money.

Putting a monetary price on time can have powerful psychological consequences. I review the recent literature examining the psychological consequences of thinking about time in terms of money and the role organizational practices play in highlighting this connection in people's lives. Over a decade of research shows payment practices highlighting the time/money connection have implications for how people make decisions to trade their free time to earn more money, volunteer their time, and socialize with their colleagues off the job. Given the proliferation of hourly payment as well as the larger gig economy, there is a clear need for future research to ascertain the consequences for individual's happiness and the spillover between work and non-work spheres.

When daily planning improves employee performance: The importance of planning type, engagement, and interruptions.

Does planning for a particular workday help employees perform better than on other days they fail to plan? We investigate this question by identifying 2 distinct types of daily work planning to explain why and when planning improves employees' daily performance. The first type is time management planning (TMP)-creating task lists, prioritizing tasks, and determining how and when to perform them. We propose that TMP enhances employees' performance by increasing their work engagement, but that these positive effects are weakened when employees face many interruptions in their day. The second type is contingent planning (CP) in which employees anticipate possible interruptions in their work and plan for them. We propose that CP helps employees stay engaged and perform well despite frequent interruptions. We investigate these hypotheses using a 2-week experience-sampling study. Our findings indicate that TMP's positive effects are conditioned upon the amount of interruptions, but CP has positive effects that are not influenced by the level of interruptions. Through this study, we help inform workers of the different planning methods they can use to increase their daily motivation and performance in dynamic work environments. (PsycINFO Database Record

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 one's 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.

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 as well. In a series of studies, we found 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 time's perceived economic value caused greater feelings of time pressure and less patient behavior. Finally, 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.

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.

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.