|
|
4th November 2009
Why We Care If You Go to the Dentist
Going to the dentist takes a bit of foresight. You need to stop surfing the Net and call up for an appointment. You need to be willing to pay something today - in terms of your time, money, and a bit of pain - to ward off potentially bad outcomes in the future. If you go the dentist, you're likely to avoid some dental problems down the road. If you go the dentist, you also generate very helpful data about the degree you care about the future.
In You Are What You Choose, we use the number of trips you make to the dentist each year as one of the questions we use to determine whether you think more about the future, or are totally focused on living today. Your Time trait, one of the six decision-making TRAITS we look at, helps us predict many different choices you make. We find that people who place a stronger value on the future are more likely to recycle, to vote, and to get the level of car safety they're after when they buy a vehicle. All these decisions are like going to the dentist, since they require you to pay a small price today in order to get a better shot at a better tomorrow.
Credit card companies would also like to know how you view the future, since they'd like to know if you're the type of person who will plan enough so that you can make your future payments. According to the New York Times, at least one company has found that people who use their credit cards to pay for a dental visit are much less likely to miss a series of credit card payments than those who use their cards to pay bills at a bar. So the next time you're about to pay a bar tab or a dental bill, remember that you may be sending the credit card company a short note about the way you're likely to behave in the future.
|
 |
|
All contents of the site © 2009 Scott de Marchi and James T. Hamilton.
|
|
|
