Framing wait time changes time perception and patience

In intertemporal choice settings, patience is driven by perceptions of the larger-later relative to the smaller-sooner reward (Loewenstein 1996; Zauberman and Lynch 2005), and by perceptions of wait time (Zauberman et al. 2009). Considering patience for receiving a larger-later (LL) reward of $150 in one week (vs. $100 now), increasing LL (e.g., from $150 to $600) is known to increase patience. Thus, increased patience can result from increasing LL magnitude. We show that this efect of LL magnitude may arise via contracted wait time perception, particularly under certain frames of wait time. Wait time may be viewed using a long frame (e.g., "how long the time until X day seems") or a far frame (e.g., "how far X day seems"). Intertemporal choice research has assessed time perceptions primarily using long (Kim, Zauberman, and Bettman 2012; LeBoeuf 2006) while other research has primarily used far (Ross and Wilson 2002; Jiga-Boy et al. 2010). Although these frames appear similar, research on semantic framing suggests that similar words may lead to diferent judgments (Fillmore 1976; Patrick and Hagdtvedt 2012).