Decisions for Others Become Less Impulsive the Further Away They Are on the Family Tree

Fenja V. Ziegler, Richard J. Tunney

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Background: People tend to prefer a smaller immediate reward to a larger but delayed reward. Although this discounting of future rewards is often associated with impulsivity, it is not necessarily irrational. Instead it has been suggested that it reflects the decision maker's greater interest in the 'me now' than the 'me in 10 years', such that the concern for our future self is about the same as for someone else who is close to us. Methodology/Principal Findings: To investigate this we used a delay-discounting task to compare discount functions for choices that people would make for themselves against decisions that they think that other people should make, e.g. to accept $500 now or $1000 next week. The psychological distance of the hypothetical beneficiaries was manipulated in terms of the genetic coefficient of relatedness ranging from zero (e.g. a stranger, or unrelated close friend),. 125 (e.g. a cousin),. 25 (e.g. a nephew or niece), to. 5 (parent or sibling). Conclusions/Significance: The observed discount functions were steeper (i.e. more impulsive) for choices in which the decision-maker was the beneficiary than for all other beneficiaries. Impulsiveness of decisions declined systematically with the distance of the beneficiary from the decision-maker. The data are discussed with reference to the implusivity and interpersonal empathy gaps in decision-making.

Original languageEnglish
Article numbere49479
JournalPLoS ONE
Volume7
Issue number11
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 Nov 2012

Bibliographical note

© 2012 Ziegler, Tunney. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Decisions for Others Become Less Impulsive the Further Away They Are on the Family Tree'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this