Short-sighted Greed? Focusing on the Future Promotes Reputation-based Generosity (trans. Maria Yu. Beletskaya)
https://doi.org/10.38050/2078-3809-2019-11-4-46-73
Abstract
Long-term thinking and voluntary resource sharing are two distinctive traits of human nature. Across three experiments (N=1,082), I propose a causal connection: Sometimes people are generous because they think about the future. Participants were randomly assigned to either focus on the present or the future and then made specific decisions in hypothetical scenarios. In Study 1 (N=200), future-focused participants shared more money in a public dictator game than present-focused participants (+39%), and they were willing to donate more money to charity (+61%). Study 2 (N=410) replicated the positive effect of future-focus on dictator giving when the choice was framed as public (+36%), but found no such effect when the choice was framed as private. That is, focusing on the future made participants more generous only when others would know their identity. Study 3 was a high-powered and pre-registered replication of Study 1 (N=472), including a few extensions. Once again, future-focused participants gave more money to charity in a public donation scenario (+40%), and they were more likely to volunteer for the same charity (+17%). As predicted, the effect was mediated by reputational concern, indicating that future-orientation can make people more generous because it also makes them more attuned to the social consequences of their choices. Taken together, the results suggest that focusing on the future promotes reputation-based generosity. By stimulating voluntary resource sharing, a central function of human foresight might be to support cooperation in groups and society.
About the Author
H. Sjåstad
Norwegian School of Economics
Norway
Norway
Hallgeir Sjåstad, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Bergen
References
1. Andreoni, J. (1988). Why free ride? Strategies and learning in public goods experiments. Journal of public Economics, 37(3), 291-304. https://doi.org/10.1016/00472727(88)90043-6
2. Apicella, C. L., Marlowe, F. W., Fowler, J. H., & Christakis, N. A. (2012). Social networks and cooperation in huntergatherers. Nature, 481(7382), 497-501. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10736
3. Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation (Vol. 5145). Basic Books (AZ).
4. Baumeister, R. F. (2005). The cultural animal: Human nature, meaning, and social life. Oxford. University Press. https://doi.Org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195167030.001.0001
5. Baumeister, R. F., Maranges, H. M., & Sjastad, H. (2018). Consciousness of the future as a matrix of maybe: Pragmatic prospection and the simulation of alternative possibilities. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice, 5(3), 223-238. https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000154
6. Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., & Oettingen, G. (2016). Pragmatic prospection: How and why people think about the future. Review of General Psychology, 20(1), 3-16. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000060
7. Bear, A., & Rand, D. G. (2016). Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation. Pro-ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(4), 936-941. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517780113
8. Beersma, B., & Van Kleef, G. A. (2011). How the grapevine keeps you in line: Gossip in-creases contributions to the group. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(6), 642-649. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550611405073
9. Ben-Ner, A., Kramer, A., & Levy, O. (2008). Economic and hypothetical dictator game ex-periments: Incentive effects at the individual level. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 37(5), 1775-1784. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2007.11.004
10. Bradley, A., Lawrence, C., & Ferguson, E. (2018). Does observability affect prosociality? Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 285(1875). https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2018.0116
11. Bulley, A., Henry, J., & Suddendorf, T. (2016). Prospection and the present moment: The role of episodic foresight in intertemporal choices between immediate and delayed rewards. Review of General Psychology, 20(1), 29-47. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000061
12. Bulley, A., Miloyan, B., Pepper, G. V., Gullo, M. J., Henry, J. D., & Suddendorf, T. (2019). Cuing both positive and negative episodic foresight reduces delay discounting but does not affect risk-taking. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021818819777
13. Camerer, C. F., Dreber, A., Holzmeister, F., Ho, T. H., Huber, J., Johannesson, M.,... & Alt-mejd, A. (2018). Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(9), 637-644. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562018-0399-z
14. Camerer, C., & Mobbs, D. (2016). Differences in behavior and brain activity during hypothet-ical and real choices. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 21(1), 46-56.
15. Camerer, C., & Weigelt, K. (1988). Experimental tests of a sequential equilibrium reputation model. Econometrica, 56(1), 1-36. https://doi.org/10.2307/1911840
16. Cappelen, A., & Tungodden, B. (Eds.) (2019). The economics of fairness. The International Library of Critical Writings in Economics Series. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785367700
17. Capraro, V., Jordan, J. J., & Rand, D. G. (2014). Heuristics guide the implementation of social preferences in oneshot Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments. Scientific reports, 4, 6790. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep06790
18. Chennu, S., Noreika, V., Gueorguiev, D., Blenkmann, A., Kochen, S., Ibanez, A., ... & Bekinschtein, T. A. (2013). Expectation and attention in hierarchical auditory prediction. Journal of Neu-roscience, 33(27), 1119411205. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0114-13.2013
19. Crockett, M. J. (2016). How formal models can illuminate mechanisms of moral judgment and decision making. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(2), 85-90. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415624012
20. Curry, O. S., Mullins, D. A., & Whitehouse, H. (2019). Is it good to cooperate? Testing the theory of morality-ascooperation in 60 societies. Current Anthropology, 60(1), 47-69. https://doi.org/10.1086/701478
21. Dennett, D. C. (2013). Intuition pumps and other tools for thinking. W. W. Norton & Company. Dennett, D. C. (2017). From bacteria to Bach and back: The evolution of minds. W. W. Nor-ton & Company. Engelmann, J. M., Herrmann, E., & Tomasello, M. (2012). Five-year olds, but not chimpanzees, attempt to manage their reputations. PLOS ONE, 7(10), e48433. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0048433
22. Engelmann, J. M., Over, H., Herrmann, E., & Tomasello, M. (2013). Young children care more about their reputation with ingroup members and potential reciprocators. Developmental Science, 16(6), 952-958. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12086
23. Eriksson, K., Vartanova, I., Strimling, P., & Simpson, B. (2019). Generosity pays: Selfish people have fewer children and earn less money. Forthcoming in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000213
24. Eyal, T., Liberman, N., & Trope, Y. (2008). Judging near and distant virtue and vice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(4), 1204-1209. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.03.012
25. Falk, A., Becker, A., Dohmen, T., Enke, B., Huffman, D., & Sunde, U. (2018). Global evidence on economic preferences. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(4), 1645-1692. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjy013
26. Faul, F., Erdfelder, E., Lang, A.-G., & Buchner, A. (2007). G*Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 175-191. https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193146
27. Fehr, E., & Schmidt, K. M. (2006). The economics of fair-ness, reciprocity and altruism – Experimental evidence and new theories. Handbook of the Economics of Giving, Altruism and Reciprocity, 1, 615-691. Elsevier B.V. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1574-0714(06)01008-6
28. Ferrante, D., Girotto, V., Straga, M., & Walsh, C. (2013). Improving the past and the future: A temporal asymmetry in hypothetical thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 142(1), 23-27. https://doi.org/10. 1037/a0027947
29. Gong, H., & Medin, D. L. (2012). Construal levels and moral judgment: Some complications. Judgment and Decision Making, 7(5), 628-638.
30. Hayes, A. F. (2017). Introduction to mediation, moderation, and conditional process analysis: A regression-based approach. Guilford Publications.
31. Helzer, E. G., & Gilovich, T. (2012). Whatever is willed will be: A temporal asymmetry in attributions to will. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(10), 1235-1246. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212448403
32. Henrich, N., & Henrich, J. P. (2007). Why humans cooperate: A cultural and evolutionary explanation. Oxford University Press.
33. Jachimowicz, J. M., Chafik, S., Munrat, S., Prabhu, J. C., & Weber, E. U. (2017). Community trust reduces myopic decisions of low-income individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(21), 5401-5406. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1617395114
34. Johnson, M. W., & Bickel, W. K. (2002). Within-subject comparison of real and hypothetical money rewards in delay discounting. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 77(2), 129-146. https://doi.org/10.1901/jeab.2002.77-129
35. Joireman, J., Shaffer, M. J., Balliet, D., & Strathman, A. (2012). Promotion orientation ex-plains why futureoriented people exercise and eat healthy: Evidence from the two-factor consider-ation of future consequences-14 scale. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(10), 1272-1287. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167212449362
36. Jordan, J., & Rand, D. G. (2019). Signaling when no one is watching: A reputation heuristics account of outrage and punishment in one-shot anonymous interactions. Forthcoming in Journal ofPersonality and Social Psychology.
37. Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. (1986). Fairness as a constraint on profit seeking: Entitlements in the market. The American Economic Review, 76(4), 728-741.
38. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263-291. https://doi.org/10.2307/1914185
39. Kidd, C., Palmeri, H., & Aslin, R. N. (2013). Rational snack-ing: Young children’s decision-making on the marshmallow task is moderated by beliefs about environmental reliability. Cognition, 126(1), 109-114. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2012.08.004
40. Kolle, F., & Wenner, L. (2018). Present-biased generosity: Time inconsistency across individual and social contexts (Discussion Paper No. 2018-02). The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Eco-nomics, University of Nottingham. Retrieved from https://econpa-pers.repec.org/paper/notnotcdx/2018-02.htm
41. Kortenkamp, K. V., & Moore, C. F. (2006). Time, un-certainty, and individual differences in decisions to cooperate in resource dilemmas. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 32(5), 603-615. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167205284006
42. Krebs, D. L. (2008). Morality: An evolutionary account. Perspectives on Psychological Sci-ence, 3(3), 149-172. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00072.x
43. McGuire, W. J. (1997). Creative hypothesis generating in psychology: Some useful heuristics. Annual Review of Psychology, 48(1), 1-30. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.48.1.1
44. Metcalfe, J., & Mischel, W. (1999). A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower. Psychological Review, 106(1), 3-19. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.106.1.3
45. Muthukrishna, M., & Henrich, J. (2019). A problem in theory. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(3), 221-229. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0522-1
46. Nowak, M., & Highfield, R. (2011). Supercooperators: Altruism, evolution, and why we need each other to succeed. Simon and Schuster.
47. Peysakhovich, A., Nowak, M. A., & Rand, D. G. (2014). Humans display a ‘cooperative phenotype’ that is domain general and temporally stable. Nature Communications, 5,4939. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms5939
48. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: The decline of violence in history and its causes. Penguin UK. Rand, D. G. (2016). Cooperation, fast and slow: Metaanalytic evidence for a theory of social heuristics and self-interested deliberation. Psycholog-ical Science, 27(9), 1192-1206. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797616654455
49. Rand, D. G., & Nowak, M. A. (2013). Human cooperation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(8), 413-425. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.06.00
50. Roberts, W. A. (2002). Are animals stuck in time? Psychological Bulletin, 128(3), 473-489. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.3.473
51. Rothbart, M., & Snyder, M. (1970). Confidence in the pre-diction and postdiction of an uncertain outcome. Cana-dian Journal of Behavioural Science / Revue Canadienne Des Sciences Du Comportement, 2(1), 38-43. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0082709
52. Sakaluk, J. K. (2016). Exploring small, confirming big: An alternative system to the new statistics for advancing cumulative and replicable psychological research. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 66, 47-54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2015.09.013
53. Schacter, D. L., Addis, D. R., & Buckner, R. L. (2007). Remembering the past to imagine the future: The prospective brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 8(9), 657-661. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2213
54. Seligman, M. E. P., Railton, P., Baumeister, R. F., & Sripada, C. (2013). Navigating into the future or driven by the past. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), 119-141. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612474317
55. Simonsohn, U. (2015). Small telescopes: Detectability and the evaluation of replication re-sults. Psychological Science, 26(5), 559-569. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614567341
56. Sloman, S., & Fernbach, P (2017). The knowledge illusion: Why we never think alone. New York: Riverhead Books.
57. Suddendorf, T. (2013). The gap: The science of what sep-arates us from other animals. New York, NY, US: Basic Books.
58. Suddendorf, T, & Corballis, M. C. (2007). The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(3), 299-313. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X07001975
59. Tomasello, M. (2016). A natural history of human morality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674915855
60. Tomasello, M., & Vaish, A. (2013). Origins of human cooperation and morality. Annual Re-view of Psychology, 64(1), 231-255. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych113011-143812
61. Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46(1), 35-57. https://doi.org/10.1086/406755
62. Vonasch, A. J., Reynolds, T., Winegard, B. M., & Baumeis-ter, R. F. (2018). Death before dishonor: Incurring costs to protect moral reputation. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 9(5), 604-613. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550617720271
63. Wu, J., Balliet, D., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2016). Reputation management: Why and how gossip enhances generosity. Evolution and Human Behavior, 37(3), 193-201. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.11.001
Review
For citations:
Sjåstad H. Short-sighted Greed? Focusing on the Future Promotes Reputation-based Generosity (trans. Maria Yu. Beletskaya). Scientific Research of Faculty of Economics. Electronic Journal. 2019;11(4):46-73. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.38050/2078-3809-2019-11-4-46-73
Views:
494
Email this article 