Dread
Also known as: Dread of anticipation
Anticipating a bad event is itself painful, so we'll rush to get it over with.
What it means
Dread is the negative utility people derive from merely anticipating an unpleasant future outcome, which can make waiting for a bad event worse than the event itself. Because the period before a feared outcome is filled with aversive anticipation, people will often pay to expedite pain — accepting a sooner or even larger harm to end the dread — producing negative time discounting for losses. This directly contradicts the discounted utility model, under which postponing a loss should always be weakly preferred. Dread, along with savoring of anticipated pleasures, shows that anticipation carries utility in its own right and that the timing of consumption interacts with feelings about the wait. It is central to understanding the sign effect and choices about painful medical or financial events.
Why the wait can hurt more than the event
Standard discounting treats the interval before a bad outcome as empty, a neutral gap you would rather push a loss into. Dread says that gap is not empty: it is occupied by aversive anticipation that carries real, felt disutility. The longer you wait, the more of that anticipation you accumulate, so a distant harm can cost more in total suffering than a sooner one. Brain-imaging work suggests the feeling is not simply fear. Berns and colleagues found that people who dreaded a coming shock most strongly showed rising activity in the pain-processing regions of cortex during the wait itself, as if attention to the expected physical sensation was already rehearsing the pain rather than only signalling danger.
What the evidence shows
Loewenstein's original study asked people what they would pay to have or avoid an event at different delays. Willingness to pay to avoid an unpleasant outcome, such as an electric shock, rose the further off it was scheduled, the signature of dread. Berns and colleagues later gave participants a live choice and found some preferred a stronger shock sooner over a weaker one later, paying in voltage to end the wait. But the effect is far from uniform. Harris tested rejection, embarrassment, pain and monetary loss across five studies and found highly variable timing preferences: some people expedited aversive events while others postponed them, and monetary losses in particular were usually deferred, not rushed.
The shape of dread over time
Dread does not grow without limit. Story and colleagues modelled how the disvalue of future pain changes with delay and found a hump: as a painful event is pushed from immediate to near-future it first becomes more aversive, then, pushed further out, less so. The rise reflects dread building as the event approaches in the near term; the eventual fall reflects ordinary discounting, which shrinks the weight on anything sufficiently distant. The two forces combine, so whether someone rushes or postpones depends on how steep their dread is relative to their impatience. This is why dread produces negative discounting for losses only within a window, not everywhere, and why the same person can dread a shock yet happily defer a tax bill.
Limits and where it breaks down
Dread is a genuine anomaly for discounted utility, but it is a tendency, not a law, and its size depends heavily on the domain and the person. It shows most clearly for visceral, embodied outcomes such as pain, where anticipation can vividly rehearse the sensation, and much less for abstract losses like money, which most people still prefer to delay. Individuals differ sharply: Hardisty and Weber show that anticipatory emotions, savoring on the upside and dread on the down, explain why the same delay feels attractive to one chooser and unbearable to another. Treating dread as universal overpredicts how often people rush to get things over with; many procrastinate on exactly the aversive tasks the theory says they should expedite.
Examples
Many people choose to receive a painful electric shock sooner rather than later, paying in discomfort just to stop dreading it.
People often book the root canal for tomorrow morning rather than a far more convenient slot next month, buying weeks of not waiting at the price of a worse appointment.
A manager sitting on redundancy news calls the meeting for nine o'clock rather than Friday, and the staff who suspect what is coming would rather hear it now than wait.
A patient asks for biopsy results by phone the same afternoon rather than waiting for next week's appointment, trading a gentler in-person delivery for days less of not knowing.
Someone who fears needles asks the nurse to give the dreaded injection right now instead of booking it for next month, choosing a jab today over weeks of anticipatory unease.
First described in Loewenstein (1987).
Key references
- Hardisty, D. J., & Weber, E. U. (2020). Impatience and savoring vs. dread: Asymmetries in anticipation explain consumer time preferences for positive vs. negative events. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 30(4), 598-613. doi.org/10.1002/jcpy.1169
- Story, G. W., Vlaev, I., Seymour, B., Winston, J. S., Darzi, A., & Dolan, R. J. (2013). Dread and the disvalue of future pain. PLoS Computational Biology, 9(11), e1003335. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003335
- Harris, C. R. (2012). Feelings of dread and intertemporal choice. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 25(1), 13-28. doi.org/10.1002/bdm.709
- Berns, G. S., Chappelow, J., Cekic, M., Zink, C. F., Pagnoni, G., & Martin-Skurski, M. E. (2006). Neurobiological substrates of dread. Science, 312(5774), 754-758. doi.org/10.1126/science.1123721
- Loewenstein, G. (1987). Anticipation and the valuation of delayed consumption. The Economic Journal, 97(387), 666-684. doi.org/10.2307/2232929