Savoring
Also known as: Anticipatory utility
Looking forward to a treat is pleasurable, so we sometimes delay it on purpose.
What it means
Savoring is the positive anticipatory utility people gain from looking forward to a desirable future event, which can lead them to delay gratification beyond what impatience alone would predict. Because the waiting period yields pleasure of its own, people may prefer to postpone a treat — scheduling the best outcome later in a sequence — to prolong the enjoyable anticipation and avoid 'using it up' too soon. This produces apparent negative discounting for gains and a preference for improving sequences over declining ones, both anomalies for the standard model. Savoring is the mirror image of dread and, with it, establishes that anticipation itself is a source of utility. It explains why people sometimes choose to wait for the better of two pleasures rather than grab the sooner one.
Examples
Told they can kiss a celebrity now or in three days, many choose to wait, relishing the anticipation in the meantime.
You save the best chocolate in the box for last and keep glancing at it, because eating it first would leave nothing to look forward to.
People book a holiday months out and say the planning is half the fun — the waiting itself pays, which is why a trip tomorrow can feel worse value than the same trip in June.
First described in Loewenstein (1987).