Future oriented thinking, planning, and delayed gratification are favorite topics in decision-making. How much, if any, people should discount rewards in the future as compared to rewards in the present is perfect debating-ground for libertarian paternalist discussions. For example, it seems like a non-controversial societal initiative would be to help people plan and save for retirement by setting default options on pension plans that nudge people to the forward looking options. Studies have shown that men and women think about themselves in the future in different ways. Since such things as retirement intervention programs are hot topics right now, planning and temporal discounting might become the focus of research programs that generate some gender-specific attention.

Researchers test what they consider to be forward-looking planning along a personal characteristic that’s called “future time perspective.” How an individual scores on a test of future time perspective is used as a proxy for their temporal horizon, the distance into the future an individual characteristically looks when making a decision about the present that has tradeoffs for the self at a later time.

Work by Jacob and Lawson was subsequently corroborated by Jones et al. in their studies of the future term perspectives of men versus women. To test this hypothesis, the authors asked subjects to imagine major life events in the future, e.g. a raise or the purchase of a house, and to provide a predicted time frame in which such a positive major life event would occur. Women’s temporal horizon was shown to be shorter (nearer to the present) than men’s. The authors interpret this study as confirming evidence for Jacob and Lawson’s results, that women typically plan less far into the future than men.

I found these results, or this interpretation or the results, surprising, given what we know about delayed rewards and discounting. Men, at least some studies have shown, are more prone to impulsive decision making. It’s counterintuitive to think that planning for the future is a relative strength of men, if we see that self-control and delayed gratification are typically stronger female strengths. My thought is that the FTP measure is getting at something other than the propensity to think in long term horizons.

Nonetheless, more research on topics of this nature can have significant policy implications. As the government is already taking steps to guide people toward delaying rewards, gender differences in foresight are highly relevant to policy interventions.