Leonard Green

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in historically high levels of psychological distress. Significant age differences in distress were consistently observed, and they present an opportunity to identify the mechanisms driving the prosocial decision-making underlying pandemic mitigation behaviors. As predicted by the cascade model of individual and age differences in prosocial motivation, re-analyses of the data from two previous surveys revealed the positive role of prosocial motivation in pandemic decisions as well as the negative roles played by neuroticism, anxiety, and depression. Social distancing was altruistically motivated, as evidenced by its positive associations with both altruism and sympathy measures. Moreover, the increases in distancing with age and concern for close others suggests that distancing was not primarily driven by concerns regarding the personal consequences of infection. Multiple age-related positivity effects were observed in which concerns and risk assessments decreased with age. Concern for others decreased with age less than concerns for oneself, suggesting a possible basis for age-related increases in altruism. Taken together, these findings suggest theoretical linkages between the cascade model and socioemotional selectivity theory, linkages that may have implications for prosocial public health messaging.

The discounting of delayed rewards plays an important role in everyday decision making, and steep discounting is associated with numerous behavioral problems. Most tasks used to assess delay discounting, however, are far simpler than many everyday decisions in which outcomes are both probabilistic and delayed. Probability, not delay, has been suggested to be the more salient attribute, a phenomenon we term delay–probability asymmetry. In two experiments, we compared preference on two‐attribute (amount and either delay or probability) tasks designed to result in equivalent discounting with preference on three‐attribute (amount, delay, and probability) tasks that included the same delay and probability conditions as well as interleaved three‐attribute conditions. Although three prominent models of choice (Białaszek et al., 2020; Killeen, 2023a; Vanderveldt et al., 2015) accurately described preference on the three‐attribute tasks, they failed to predict the asymmetry. Our results showed that the asymmetry resulted primarily from a decrease in delay discounting rather than from an increase in the salience of probability discounting. This decrease in degree of delay discounting may lead to more patient decisions in everyday choice situations and could reflect a shift to a better long‐term decision‐making strategy when outcomes are both probabilistic and delayed.

Every day we encounter situations in which decisions require trade‐offs between the delay to one reward and the likelihood of receiving another reward. The current study was designed to extend a general discounting framework to gain insights into this fundamental trade‐off process. Forty‐three undergraduates adjusted the probability of receiving an immediate hypothetical monetary reward (either $200 or $10,000) until that probabilistic reward was judged subjectively equal in value to the same reward received with certainty after a delay (ranging from 1 month to 25 years). We replicated previous findings that demonstrated a linear relation between log(delay) and log(odds‐against), derived from the subjective probabilistic values. This linear relation was predicted when these choices were analyzed with the hyperboloid functions that describe simple delay and probability discounting in human decision making. Additionally, we extended the discounting framework and showed that the trade‐off between risk and delay was well described by a modified hyperboloid discounting model (R²s = .99). These findings suggest that the discounting framework provides a valuable approach for capturing complexities of human decision making.

Objectives: Previous studies failed to find age-related differences in the discounting of delayed, monetary losses, potentially due to their failure to examine the effects of income and their use of relatively small loss amounts. Accordingly, the present study examined the effects of age and income on the degree to which adults discount a broad range of loss amounts. Methods: A total of 594 participants (age range: 20 to 80; income range: <$30,000 to >$100,000) performed an adjusting-amount discounting task. Delayed loss amounts were $150, $2,500, and $30,000; delays ranged from 1 month to 10 years. Results: Older participants discounted losses less steeply than younger participants. As expected, young adults’ discounting was unrelated to income, but among participants 35 years and older, those with higher incomes discounted less steeply than those with lower incomes. Analyses revealed a quadratic effect of age, reflecting the decrease in discounting between ages 35 and 65, after which discounting remained relatively stable until the age of 80. Additionally, age had much less of an effect when the delayed payments were small. Discussion: Contrary to the socioemotional selectivity theory, older adults discounted delayed monetary payments less steeply than younger adults, leading to decisions that minimized long-term losses. Age differences increased with the amount of loss, which may explain the failure to find significant relations between age and the discounting of delayed losses in studies that used much smaller amounts. Our results suggest that the decrease in discounting with income is a general finding observed with both delayed gains and losses.

Cooperation involves an individual's choice that benefits both themself and others —in contrast to selfishness, which benefits the individual only—and has been suggested to be more likely when the benefit to others, discounted as a function of their social distance (i.e., social discounting), exceeds the undiscounted cost to the cooperator. To test this hypothesis, we exposed 126 participants to eight, one‐shot reward matrices of prisoner's dilemma games, among which socially discounted benefits and undiscounted costs systematically varied. Increasing benefits and increasing costs increased and decreased, respectively, the percentage of cooperators across the matrices. Then, 111 participants from the original sample completed one of five iterated, 40‐trial reward matrices programmed to play a tit‐for‐tat strategy, among which benefits and costs varied. Overall, increasing benefits and increasing costs increased and decreased, respectively, cooperation across trials. This tendency, however, was more clearly observed in later than earlier trials. Both in one‐shot and in iterated games, the effect of costs was greater than that of benefits and the effects of both benefits and costs decreased at extreme values. These findings suggest that cost–benefit balance, modulated by social discounting, determines degree of cooperation in both one‐shot and repeated‐trial cooperation tasks.

Two experiments examined pigeons' discounting of probabilistic food reinforcers using a concurrent‐chains procedure within sessions combined with an adjusting‐amount procedure across sessions. The study is the first to evaluate probability discounting functions in nonhuman animals in which the obtained probability equaled that programmed in each session. In Experiment 1, pigeons chose between a smaller, certain and a larger, but probabilistic food reinforcer. In Experiment 2, the probabilities of receiving both reinforcement options were reduced by a common factor, creating a choice situation in which both options were probabilistic: a smaller, more probable reinforcer and a larger, but less probable reinforcer. Results revealed that regardless of whether choices involved a certain versus a probabilistic reinforcer or they involved two probabilistic reinforcers, subjective value decreased systematically as a function of the odds against receipt of the reinforcer and that the data were well described by the hyperboloid discounting function. In addition, no significant effect of reinforcer amount on degree of probability discounting was observed, consistent with results from studies of the discounting of delayed reinforcers by nonhuman animals.

Although the authors of a recent meta-analysis concluded there were no age-related differences in the discounting of delayed rewards, they did not examine the effects of income (Seaman et al., 2022). Accordingly, the present study compared discounting by younger and older adults (Ages 35-50 and 65-80) differing in household income. Two procedures were used: the Monetary Choice Questionnaire and the Adjusting-Amount procedure. Whereas no age difference was observed between the higher income (> $80,000) age groups, a significant difference was observed between younger and older adults with lower incomes (< $50,000): The younger adults discounted more steeply than the older adults. These findings, which were observed with both discounting procedures, support our buffering hypothesis, which assumes that the scarcity associated with a lower income is a stressor that can lead to steeper discounting, but that age-related increases in emotional stability can buffer such stressors, leading to age-related differences between lower income age groups. In contrast, no age difference was observed in higher income adults who experience much less scarcity. Further support for the buffering hypothesis comes from the finding that there was no age-related difference in discounting by the lower income groups when distress was statistically controlled. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The vast majority of studies on discounting have focused on simple delayed outcomes, but most everyday decisions are more complicated. The present experiment focused on one such scenario, an iconic self‐control situation in which immediate gains are followed by delayed losses. The same participants were studied in all conditions to permit examination of individual differences in choice behavior using intercorrelations and factor analysis. Consistent with previous research, the hyperboloid model accurately described the form of the discounting function and discounting was not affected by the amount of the delayed loss when it was presented alone. However, replicating other studies, smaller delayed losses were discounted more steeply than larger ones when presented in combination with immediate gains. Exploratory factor analysis revealed two factors, one loading primarily on loss‐only conditions and the other loading primarily on conditions involving outcomes that combined gains and losses. These results imply that there are individual differences in how one combines gains and losses and that this characteristic of individual decision making might be an important predictor of decisions in the many everyday choice situations that involve complex outcomes.