TITLE:
Prosocial People Take Better Care of Their Own Future Well-Being
AUTHORS:
Sergio Da Silva, Raul Matsushita, Mateus De Carvalho
KEYWORDS:
Other-Regarding Preferences, Social Value Orientation, Multiple Selves, Intertemporal Choice, Impatience
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Access Library Journal,
Vol.2 No.12,
December
18,
2015
ABSTRACT: There is neuroscientific evidence that people consider future versions of
themselves as other people. As a result, intertemporal choice should refer to
the interaction between multiple selves. We combine this notion of multiple
selves in delay discounting with the approach for other-regarding preferences known as Social Value
Orientation. The Social Value Orientation is a psychologically richer framework
that generalizes the economic assumption of narrow self-interest. People are
assumed to vary in their motivations toward resource allocation between them
and the others. When making such allocation decisions they may still be
individualistic, but can also be competitive, prosocial, or even altruistic. We
apply an experimental measure of impatience to a sample of 437 undergraduates,
measure their Social Value Orientation, and collect selected demographic
variables: gender, age, handedness, parenthood, religiousness, and current
emotional state. We find prosocial participants to be more patient. Those who
care for the others in the present also take better care of themselves in the
future. We also find a participant’s age and handedness to matter for his or
her Social Value Orientation.