I'll have to dig up my books again, as I've put this together over the last... I'd say five years.
My personal reasoning as to why instant gratification is a genetic inclination comes from my involvement with animals, and specifically with greyhound rescue work.
Greyhounds are not exceptionally intelligent dogs and quite clearly lack the capacity for abstract thought. So what does an animal like that do? It lives in the moment. It has very little in the way of foresight and operates almost entirely off of instinct and conditioning.
Since humans are really just animals with a capacity for abstract thought, I got to thinking that we've only been around for approximately 10,000 years or so. Conversely, primates in some shape or form have been around for an exponentially greater time, and mammals proper even longer than that. With all that in mind, and given my own casual research into psychology, I strongly believe that many of our actions today are strongly influenced by our genetic programming that has been developed over millions of years. Civilization may have made certain aspects of this programming obsolete (debatably), but we still retain the core programming.
Now think about what it was like for early hominids. Food was scarce. It was limited to whatever you could scrounge up or kill. Protection from the elements was a huge issue. Being wounded was typically the beginning of the end.
Since you were effectively living on borrowed time, you had to get a lot done in a short span in order to fulfill your two primary instincts: survive and replicate. The most effective way to do that at the time was to go for the instant gratification.
Eat now. You might not have the chance later.
Don't fight that thing. If it doesn't kill you, it will wound you. Kill something that requires less work and won't end your life.
Mate now. You can't guarantee a second chance.
Because of those sorts of conditions, people instinctively go for instant gratification. In modern times, the way we've organized our society and provided ourselves with protection, longevity, and wealth, we see that long-term planning and delayed gratification yields a higher benefit. But what do most people do? They still seek instant gratification. Even people who are good at long-term planning still feel the temptation because that's the way our DNA has been wired.
Advertisers understand this. For the longest time, ads have been based on manipulation instead of information. They give you information in order to allay your concerns, suspicions and reservations, but they use manipulation to reel you in and close the sale.
For example, look at the diet and exercise industry. Look at the kind of promises they make. Bowflex promises you a better body in 60 days and shows you pictures of Conan the Personal Trainer. The so called Hollywood Celebrity Diet (I think?) promised to make you lose weight in one week.
Instant gratification both. Naturally, Bowflex doesn't tell you to diet as well and that you probably don't have the genetics to look like Beefcake Van Pectorals on the commercials there. And the Hollywood Diet people neglect to mention that their diet is really just a fast and the weight you lose is scalar.
But people still buy it because they want instant results. They want it enough to forget to ask questions and just go ahead and try it.
The industry standard is now to appeal to instant gratification because that flicks on a light bulb in our brains and causes a little voice to say, "That! Take that! You'll get the reward faster with that!"
A lot of people think this is wrong, frankly I don't care. No one's going to change the industry anymore than they're going to change their genetic code. It's technically not false advertising, and if you're smart you'll think twice before clicking on "Proceed to Cart" anyway.
