Self-Control, Social Preferences and the Effect of Delayed Payments

We extend the dual-self model to include altruistic preferences. This explains (1) why people may have preferences for equality in the laboratory but not in the field, (2) why intermediate donations may occur in dictator games, (3) why cognitive load and time pressure may increase giving, and (4) why people often "avoid the ask" from solicitors when they would have donated if avoiding was impossible. Also, our model predicts that (5) delaying payments to both parties in the dictator game decreases giving. We verify this prediction in two large-scale experiments: people give less when payoffs are delayed.

[1]  Gary E. Bolton,et al.  ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition , 2000 .

[2]  David G. Rand,et al.  Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation , 2014, Nature Communications.

[3]  David G. Rand,et al.  What Does 'Clean' Really Mean? The Implicit Framing of Decontextualized Experiments , 2013 .

[4]  Peter P. J. L. Verkoeijen,et al.  Does Intuition Cause Cooperation? , 2014, PloS one.

[5]  David G. Rand,et al.  Heuristics guide the implementation of social preferences in one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma experiments , 2014, Scientific Reports.

[6]  Ted O’Donoghue,et al.  Doing It Now or Later , 1999 .

[7]  Peter H. M. P. Roelofsma,et al.  Immediacy and Certainty in Intertemporal Choice , 1995 .

[8]  Alan S. Brown,et al.  Information Processing and Cognition: The Loyola Symposium , 1976 .

[9]  D. Fudenberg,et al.  An approximate dual-self model and paradoxes of choice under risk , 2012 .

[10]  Jesse M. Shapiro,et al.  WHO IS 'BEHAVIORAL'? COGNITIVE ABILITY AND ANOMALOUS PREFERENCES. , 2013, Journal of the European Economic Association.

[11]  Peter Hammerstein,et al.  Game theory and human evolution: a critique of some recent interpretations of experimental games. , 2006, Theoretical population biology.

[12]  A. Tversky,et al.  The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. , 1981, Science.

[13]  G. Loewenstein,et al.  The Heat of the Moment: Modeling Interactions Between Affect and Deliberation , 2007 .

[14]  D. Kahneman.  A perspective on judgment and choice: mapping bounded rationality. , 2003, The American psychologist.

[15]  Ola Andersson,et al.  Deciding for Others Reduces Loss Aversion , 2013, Manag. Sci..

[16]  Roberto A. Weber,et al.  Sorting in Experiments with Application to Social Preferences , 2019 .

[17]  David G. Rand,et al.  Humans Display a 'Cooperative Phenotype' that is Domain General and Temporally Stable , 2014 .

[18]  J. Andreoni,et al.  Which is the Fair Sex? Gender Differences in Altruism , 2001 .

[19]  David G. Rand,et al.  Spontaneous giving and calculated greed , 2012, Nature.

[20]  Siegfried Dewitte,et al.  Bulletin Personality and Social Psychology Are Social Value Orientations Expressed Automatically? Decision Making in the Dictator Game on Behalf Of: Society for Personality and Social Psychology , 2022 .

[21]  Verena Utikal,et al.  Affect and fairness: Dictator games under cognitive load , 2014 .

[22]  R. Thaler.  Mental accounting matters , 1999 .

[23]  David G. Rand,et al.  Social Context and the Dynamics of Cooperative Choice , 2014 .

[24]  Dominic D. P. Johnson,et al.  The Biological and Evolutionary Logic of Human Cooperation , 2005 .

[25]  David I. Laibson,et al.  Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting , 1997 .

[26]  David G. Rand,et al.  Human cooperation , 2013, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[27]  Stephan Meier,et al.  Do People Behave in Experiments as in the Field? Evidence from Donations , 2006 .

[28]  Catherine C. Eckel,et al.  Differences in the Economic Decisions of Men and Women: Experimental Evidence , 2008 .

[29]  J. Horowitz,et al.  Fairness in Simple Bargaining Experiments , 1994 .

[30]  David G. Rand,et al.  Reflection does not undermine self-interested prosociality , 2014, Front. Behav. Neurosci..

[31]  Duncan J. Watts,et al.  Cooperation and Contagion in Web-Based, Networked Public Goods Experiments , 2010, SECO.

[32]  Roberto A. Weber,et al.  Exploiting moral wiggle room: experiments demonstrating an illusory preference for fairness , 2007 .

[33]  Manel Baucells,et al.  Common ratio using delay , 2010 .

[34]  Dent,et al.  Cognitive Load and the Equality Heuristic: A Two-Stage Model of Resource Overconsumption in Small Groups. , 2000, Organizational behavior and human decision processes.

[35]  M. Posner,et al.  Attention and cognitive control. , 1975 .

[36]  Jonathan Evans.  In two minds: dual-process accounts of reasoning , 2003, Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[37]  M. Rabin.  Published by: American , 2022 .

[38]  John H. Miller,et al.  NOTES AND COMMENTS GIVING ACCORDING TO GARP: AN EXPERIMENTAL TEST OF THE CONSISTENCY OF PREFERENCES FOR ALTRUISM , 2002 .

[39]  Christoph Engel,et al.  Dictator games: a meta study , 2010 .

[40]  David G. Rand,et al.  Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation , 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[41]  R. Pollak,et al.  SECOND-BEST NATIONAL SAVING AND GAME-EQUILIBRIUM GROWTH , 1980 .

[42]  J. List,et al.  Testing for Altruism and Social Pressure in Charitable Giving , 2009, The quarterly journal of economics.

[43]  J. Ledyard.  Public Goods: A Survey of Experimental Research , 1994 .

[44]  O. Johansson-Stenman,et al.  Are Social Preferences Skin Deep? Dictators under Cognitive Load , 2009 .

[45]  David G. Rand,et al.  The online laboratory: conducting experiments in a real labor market , 2010, ArXiv.

[46]  E. Fehr.  A Theory of Fairness, Competition and Cooperation , 1998 .

[47]  Ernan Haruvy,et al.  Are You Risk Averse over Other People's Money? , 2011 .

[48]  I. Ial,et al.  Nature Communications , 2010, Nature Cell Biology.

[49]  M. Rabin,et al.  UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL PREFERENCES WITH SIMPLE TESTS , 2001 .

[50]  Jesse Chandler,et al.  Nonnaïveté among Amazon Mechanical Turk workers: Consequences and solutions for behavioral researchers , 2013, Behavior Research Methods.

[51]  Daniel Västfjäll,et al.  Intuition and cooperation reconsidered , 2013, Nature.

[52]  D. Fudenberg,et al.  Risk, Delay, and Convex Self-Control Costs , 2010 .

[53]  Anna Breman,et al.  Give more tomorrow: Two field experiments on altruism and intertemporal choice , 2011 .

[54]  David G. Rand,et al.  Social Heuristics and Social Roles: Intuition Favors Altruism for Women But Not for Men , 2016, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[55]  Jaromír Kovářík.  Giving it now or later: Altruism and discounting , 2009 .

[56]  Drew Fudenberg,et al.  Timing and Self-Control , 2012 .

[57]  David G. Rand,et al.  Fast but Not Intuitive, Slow but Not Reflective: Decision Conflict Drives Reaction Times in Social Dilemmas , 2015, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[58]  Judd B. Kessler,et al.  Learning from (failed) replications: Cognitive load manipulations and charitable giving , 2014 .

[59]  David G. Rand,et al.  Time Pressure Increases Cooperation in Competitively Framed Social Dilemmas , 2014, PloS one.

[60]  Jordi Brandts,et al.  Reference Points and Negative Reciprocity in Simple Sequential Games , 2001, Games Econ. Behav..

[61]  Justin M. Rao,et al.  Avoiding The Ask : A Field Experiment on Altruism , Empathy , and Charitable Giving ∗ , 2011 .

[62]  R. H. Strotz.  Myopia and Inconsistency in Dynamic Utility Maximization , 1955 .

[63]  R. Thaler.  Toward a positive theory of consumer choice , 1980 .

[64]  R. Thaler,et al.  An Economic Theory of Self-Control , 1977, Journal of Political Economy.

[65]  Ernst Fehr,et al.  Rethinking fast and slow based on a critique of reaction-time reverse inference , 2015, Nature Communications.

[66]  D. Fudenberg,et al.  A Dual Self Model of Impulse Control , 2004, The American economic review.

[67]  E. Fehr,et al.  Changing Social Norm Compliance with Noninvasive Brain Stimulation , 2013, Science.