The consideration of future consequences: Weighing immediate and distant outcomes of behavior.
1994/04/01 by Alan Strathman, Faith Gleicher, David S. Boninger +3 · 1,706 citations
Psychology · #Applied psychology #Behavioral Health and Interventions #Mental Health Research Topics #Psychological and Temporal Perspectives Research #Psychology #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.66.4.742
published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66(4), 742-752 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 1994/04/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Abstract
We propose a new construct called consideration of future consequences (CFC), which is hypothesized to be a stable individual difference in the extent to which people consider distant versus immediate consequences of potential behaviors. Following a description of the construct itself, a measure of this individual difference is developed and validated. Data collected from 7 samples of college students indicates that the measure has acceptable reliability and validity. In addition, evidence of the role of CFC in regulating affective responses to negative events is reviewed. The utility of the CFC construct is demonstrated in 2 studies
Cited by
- Beyond the Turk: Alternative platforms for crowdsourcing behavioral research
- How to SHIFT Consumer Behaviors to be More Sustainable: A Literature Review and Guiding Framework
- Predicting road traffic accidents: The role of social deviance and violations
- The Role of Short-Termism and Uncertainty Avoidance in Organizational Inaction on Climate Change
- When does the present end and the future begin?
- The dispositional basis of deviance: A multivariate approach to crime and other deviant acts
- Out of Sight, Out of Time? A Meta–Analytic Investigation of Procrastination and Time Perspective
- Time perspective and attitude‐behaviour consistency in future‐oriented behaviours
- Future You: Designing and Evaluating Multimodal AI-generated Digital Twins for Strengthening Future Self-Continuity
- Improving Phishing Resilience with AI-Generated Training: Evidence on Prompting, Personalization, and Duration
- Does goal relevant episodic future thinking amplify the effect on delay discounting?
- Beliefs and perceptions about the future: A measurement of future time perspective
- Time perspective and volunteerism: The importance of focusing on the future
- Situational and Personality Factors as Direct or Personal Norm Mediated Predictors of Pro-environmental Behavior: Questions Derived From Norm-activation Theory
- Making Things Happen: A Model of Proactive Motivation
- Promoting prosociality toward future generations in antibiotic intake
- Psychological barriers to participation in the labor market: Evidence from rural Ghana
- Impartial Intergenerational Beneficence: The Psychology of Feeling (Equal) Intergenerational Concern for All Future Generations
- Why People With an Eye Toward the Future Are More Moral: The Role of Abstract Thinking
- Population-Aligned Persona Generation for LLM-based Social Simulation
- A Program for the Comprehensive Cognitive Training of Excess Weight (TRAINEP): The Study Protocol for A Randomized, Controlled Trial
- Trajectories of desistance and continuity in antisocial behavior following court adjudication among serious adolescent offenders
- Time perspective and environmental engagement: A meta‐analysis
- Quality–Quantity Tradeoffs in Consumption
- Time is shrinking in the eye of AI: AI agents influence intertemporal choice
- When less is more: Consumer aversion to unused utility
- Spotlight on Affect: Affect and Affective Forecasting in Impulse Control
- Keeping secure to the end: a long-term perspective to understand employees’ consequence-delayed information security violation
- Does self-affirmation following ego depletion moderate restrained eaters’ explicit preferences for, and implicit associations with, high-calorie foods?
- Enhancing chatbot effectiveness: The role of anthropomorphic conversational styles and time orientation
- General self‐efficacy in various domains of human functioning: Evidence from five countries
- Understanding the Construct of Maximizing Tendency: A Theoretical and Empirical Evaluation
- Taking Stock: Integrating and Differentiating Multiple Proactive Behaviors
- The Cognitive Reflection Test as a predictor of performance on heuristics-and-biases tasks
- It’s about Time! CEOs’ Temporal Dispositions, Temporal Leadership, and Corporate Entrepreneurship
- The reliability of the twelve-item general health questionnaire (GHQ-12) under realistic assumptions. [europepmc]
- Tendencies Toward Mania and Tendencies Toward Depression Have Distinct Motivational, Affective, and Cognitive Correlates. [europepmc]
- A randomized controlled trial of a behavioral economic supplement to brief motivational interventions for college drinking. [europepmc]
- Adherence to a smartphone application for weight loss compared to website and paper diary: pilot randomized controlled trial. [europepmc]
- Four converging measures of temporal discounting and their relationships with intelligence, executive functions, thinking dispositions, and behavioral outcomes. [europepmc]
- Which Psychological Factors are Related to HIV Testing? A Quantitative Systematic Review of Global Studies. [europepmc]
- The behavioral economics of young adult substance abuse. [europepmc]
- Hour glass half full or half empty? Future time perspective and preoccupation with negative events across the life span. [europepmc]
- Weight Loss Associated With Different Patterns of Self-Monitoring Using the Mobile Phone App My Meal Mate. [europepmc]
- Does goal relevant episodic future thinking amplify the effect on delay discounting? [europepmc]
- Future Time Perspective in the Work Context: A Systematic Review of Quantitative Studies. [europepmc]
- Bleak Present, Bright Future: Online Episodic Future Thinking, Scarcity, Delay Discounting, and Food Demand. [europepmc]
- Motivational power of future time perspective: Meta-analyses in education, work, and health. [europepmc]
- Nutrition Questionnaires plus (NQplus) study, a prospective study on dietary determinants and cardiometabolic health in Dutch adults. [europepmc]
- Personalized behavior change program for glaucoma patients with poor adherence: a pilot interventional cohort study with a pre-post design. [europepmc]
- Experimental reductions of delay discounting and impulsive choice: A systematic review and meta-analysis. [europepmc]
- Impulsivity and consideration of future consequences as moderators of the association between emotional eating and body weight status. [europepmc]
- Episodic future thinking and grocery shopping online. [europepmc]
- Modulating Activity in the Prefrontal Cortex Changes Intertemporal Choice for Loss: A Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Study. [europepmc]
- Financial Incentives to Increase Colorectal Cancer Screening Uptake and Decrease Disparities: A Randomized Clinical Trial. [europepmc]
- Sex Differences and Effects of Predictive Cues on Delayed Punishment Discounting. [europepmc]
- Implications of Unconnected Micro, Molecular, and Molar Level Research in Psychology: The Case of Executive Functions, Self-Regulation, and External Regulation. [europepmc]
- Big Five and HEXACO Personality Traits, Proenvironmental Attitudes, and Behaviors: A Meta-Analysis. [europepmc]
- Individual Differences in Intertemporal Choice. [europepmc]
- Linking Brain Age Gap to Mental and Physical Health in the Berlin Aging Study II. [europepmc]
Related