Willingness to wait task

During the task, participants encountered forty synopses. Synopses were taken verbatim from a popular online book merchant. We avoided bestsellers or award-winning books while sampling a variety of genres across fiction and non-fiction books. We imposed a minimum word count of 60 and a maximum word count of 200. Flesch Kincaid reading ease scores for selected synopses were between 7.5 and 85.

Figure ​Figure11 shows an illustration of a trial. Participants were allowed a maximum of 1 min to read a synopsis. To judge familiarity, participants were asked whether they had read the book previously. They then rated how much they enjoyed reading the item on a scale from 1 (“hated it”) to 9 (“loved it”). To measure arousal, they were asked how tired they were on a scale of 1 (“very tired”) to 9 (“not tired at all”). Subsequently, they encountered two multiple-choice comprehension questions to answer, one literal and one which involved drawing inferences³². We piloted comprehension questions with a sample of 20 participants, ensuring no question was answered with >40% accuracy in isolation.

Participants were then given a choice to see the book cover of the synopses they read. They had two choices, either “skip” or “wait”. They were asked to select “skip” if they did not want to see the book cover, to move on to the next trial. Participants waited for 2s before moving on to the next trial. Participants were instructed to select “wait” if they wanted to find out more about the book (i.e., see the book cover). If they chose to wait, participants waited an additional 1–4s (on top of the 2s) before the book cover was revealed. The time delays for each cover to appear consequently varied between 3, 4, 5, or 6s. Time delays were counterbalanced for each synopsis across participants to ensure that delay did not specifically affect decisions. Our task included two trials to assess attention during the task. Participants read a short extract and answered one question about that extract. Participants were told the entire task was expected to take 1h, and they would be paid a fixed amount (£5.10).