Temporal discounting and environmental risks: The role of ethical and loss-related concerns

Abstract The present research proposes and tests an explanation for the prior finding that temporal discounting is less pronounced for environmental risks than for other types of risk. According to Bohm and Pfister (Acta Psychol. 104 (2000) 317), risk evaluations contain two components: ethical concerns focus on the morality of the actions causing the risk; loss-related concerns focus on potential future losses. We argue that the observed low discount levels are due to the prominence of ethical concerns in the evaluation of environmental risks, which in turn results from differences in causal structure between environmental and other risks. An experiment was conducted, in which participants read brief descriptions of fictitious risky situations. The causal structure of the risks and the temporal delay of potential negative consequences were varied. Dependent variables were the perceived seriousness of the risks and the prominence of ethical concerns. Subjects also rated 18 environmental and other risks on various characteristics. As predicted, the causal structure of environmental risks differs from that of other risks and such differences seem to promote the role of ethical concerns in risk evaluation. We were unable to establish, however, that these differences affect temporal discounting. Implications, e.g. for ‘dual process theories’ of risk evaluation, are discussed.