Evolutionary origins of temporal discounting: Modeling how time and uncertainty constrain optimal decision-making strategies across taxa

The propensity of humans and non-human animals to discount future returns for short-term benefits is well established. This contrasts with the ability of organisms to unfold complex developmental sequences over months or years efficiently. Research has focused on various descriptive and predictive parameters of 'temporal discounting' in behavior, and researchers have proposed models to explain temporal preference in terms of fitness-maximizing outcomes. Still, the underlying ultimate cause of this phenomenon has not been deeply explored across taxa. Here, we propose an ultimate (i.e., evolutionary) causal explanation for the selection of temporal discounting largely conserved across taxa. We propose that preference for a short-term reward (e.g., heightened impulsivity) often is less than optimal and likely is the product of constraints imposed on natural selection with respect to predicting events in a temporal framework in the context of future uncertainty. Using a simple Newtonian model for time across a fitness landscape in which movement by organisms is only possible in one direction, we examine several factors that influence the ability of an organism to choose a distant reward over a more temporally proximate reward: including the temporal distance of the far reward, the relative value of the distant reward, and the effect of uncertainty about the value and presence of the distant reward. Our results indicate that an organism may choose a more distant reward, but only if it is not too far into the future and has a substantially higher-value fitness payoff relative to the short-term reward. Notably, any uncertainty about the distant reward made it extremely unlikely for an organism to choose the delayed reward strategy compared to choosing a closer reward, even if the distant reward had a much higher payoff because events that are uncertain are only partially visible to natural selection pressures. The results help explain why natural selection is constrained to promote more optimal behavioral strategies and why it has difficulty selecting a distant reward over a lower-value short-term reward. The degree of uncertainty is an especially salient ecological variable in promoting and preferencing short-term behavioral strategies across taxa. These results further help illustrate why, from an ultimate causal perspective, human and non-human taxa have difficulty making more optimal long-term decisions.