Association for Behavior Analysis International

Since the inception of behavioral economics in the early 1980s, the intersection of behavioral science and microeconomic principles has yielded novel insights into health-related behaviors and their promotion. Early applications primarily explore the abuse liability of pharmacological agents in nonhumans. However, as behavioral scientists began translating behavioral economics outside the operant chamber, researchers and policymakers soon discovered that behavioral economic principles and applications could be taken to scale to inform public health policies and preventative healthcare. This symposium highlights cutting-edge applications of behavioral economic principles and procedures to health decision making. The presentations featured in this symposium range from basic decision making studies on episodic future thinking regarding cancer to applications of mindfulness to alter delay discounting of food. Despite the novel applications across each of the four presentations, a common thread unifying these studies is the reliance on discounting processes and assays to evaluate health decision making under uncertainty or in the face of intertemporal tradeoffs common attributes in most real-world health decisions. These use-inspired studies underscore the translational utility of behavioral economics for health promotion and advancing the fields understand of healthy decision making.

Discounting analyses have robustly contributed to our understanding of clinical disorders such as addiction, problematic gambling, and obesity. Importantly, individuals rates of discounting predict the progression of addiction and the success of addiction treatments. That success suggests that discounting analyses may help predict health behavior in other clinical populations. For example, individuals with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) frequently have low levels of medication adherence. Predicting which individuals will have adherence difficulties may help direct treatment resources to those that need it the most. The current study developed a novel probability discounting paradigm which assessed the effects of differing probabilities of medication efficacy and side effects in a sample of MS patients whom typically were (n=35) or where not (n=35) adherent with their treatments. Discounting was both different across groups and was predictive of group membership, even when accounting for other MS related variables (fatigue, depression, etc.).