Patience is a virtue: Cooperative people have lower discount rates

doi:10.1016/j.paid.2007.09.023

Personality and Individual Differences

Volume 44, Issue 3, February 2008, Pages 780-785

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2007.09.023 Get rights and content

Abstract

Reciprocal altruism involves foregoing an immediate benefit for the sake of a greater long-term reward. It follows that individuals who exhibit a stronger preference for future over immediate rewards should be more disposed to engage in reciprocal altruism – in other words, ‘patient’ people should be more cooperative. The present study tested this prediction by investigating whether participants’ contributions in a public-good game correlated with their ‘discount rate’. The hypothesis was supported: patient people are indeed more cooperative. The paper discusses alternative interpretations of this result, and makes some suggestions for future research.

Introduction

Evolutionary theory has no problem explaining why organisms are impatient. Other things being equal, the sooner an organism can acquire the resources needed to reproduce the better (Daly & Wilson, 2005). It is a problem, however, for evolutionary theory to explain why organisms are ever ‘patient’ – that is, why they ever delay consumption of a resource. The solution involves identifying situations in which foregoing an immediate benefit creates a future benefit that is sufficiently large to compensate for the delay.

Reciprocal altruism provides one example of just such a situation. Reciprocal altruism involves foregoing a benefit (or incurring a cost) now – in terms of acting altruistically to benefit another – in order to receive a larger benefit in return at a later date (Axelrod, 1984, Trivers, 1971). For reciprocal altruism to evolve, the returned benefit must not only be greater than the cost, it must be sufficiently great to compensate for the delay (Axelrod, 1984, pp. 12–13, 126–7).

Axelrod used the terms ‘discount parameter’ or ‘discount rate’ to refer to the rate at which the objective value of a benefit declines as a function of the delay in its delivery; the same figure – when employed as an ‘interest rate’ – can be used to calculate the rate at which the value of a benefit must increase over time in order to be ‘worth the wait’. Subsequent empirical research into temporal decision-making has used ‘discount rate’ to refer to the degree to which individuals subjectively discount the value of future rewards as a function of delay in their delivery. Studies have shown that, on average, people have a subjective discount rate of approximately 1% per day – but different individuals on different tasks exhibit “spectacular variation” in discount rates (Frederick, Loewenstein, & O’Donoghue, 2003, p. 14).

Given that individuals differ in the degree to which they value the future, we should expect such differences to be reflected in individual differences in the degree to which individuals engage in reciprocal altruism – in other words, ‘patient’ people should be more cooperative.

One previous study has indeed found such a relationship (Harris, 2001, Harris and Madden, 2002). Harris found a 0.4 correlation between discount rate and defections in a 40-round, two-player, prisoner’s dilemma.

The present study looked at whether a similar effect could be found in a different game: a one-shot, variable contribution, four-player public-good game. In such one-shot games the payoff-maximizing choice is always to defect, or to contribute as little as possible. Nevertheless, people tend to play such games ‘as if’ they are repeated, and feel that they ‘ought’ to cooperate, and do so, albeit at a lower level (Ostrom, 1998, Trivers, 2004). Thus the present study provides a more stringent test of the hypothesis that patient people will be more cooperative.

Section snippets

Method

The study involved eight public-good game sessions at the Interdisciplinary Experimental Laboratory at Indiana University, Bloomington. Participants (N = 96; 56 male, 40 female) were undergraduates from economics and psychology classes who had volunteered their email addresses for inclusion in a participant recruitment database. In each session, twelve participants were randomly assigned into four-player groups. Participants received a US$5.00 show-up fee, and were told that they could earn

Results

The results revealed a significant correlation, in the expected direction, between contribution and discount rate.

Overall, the mean contribution to the group account was 4.3 tokens (sd = 3.5). And the mean discount rate was 0.011 (sd = 0.005); in other words, the average participant devalued future rewards at the rate of 1.1% per day. Neither contributions nor discount rates were related to participant sex (Mann–Whitney and t-tests, two-tailed p values > 0.28). And neither contributions nor discount

Discussion

The results support the prediction that patient people are more cooperative, even in a one-shot public-good game.

The correlation between cooperativeness and discount rate was somewhat weaker than the 0.4 correlation between discount rate and defections that Harris (Harris, 2001, Harris and Madden, 2002) found in a repeated two-player prisoner’s dilemma game. While there is reason to think that cooperativeness would have been higher in our game if it too had been repeated, or if anonymity had

Conclusion

The present study demonstrated that patience is a virtue, in the sense that participants who cooperated by contributing more to the public-good exhibited lower discount rates. The study also brought to light a series of deeper issues that have to do with the mechanisms responsible for decisions over time and the nature of patience.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to: Jim Cox, Elinor Ostrom, and Jimmy Walker for help with the design of the public-good game; Kris Kirby and Pontus Strimling for advice on the discount-rate test; Helena Cronin for extensive discussion of the topic, and for detailed comments on several drafts of the paper; Ron Baker and David Price for invaluable technical assistance; and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. This research was generously funded by the Indiana University Workshop in Political Theory and

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Short CommunicationPatience is a virtue: Cooperative people have lower discount rates

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Method

Results

Discussion

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Evolution and Human Behavior

TRENDS in Cognitive Science

The evolution of cooperation

Cues of being watched enhance cooperation in a real-world setting

Biology Letters

Carpe diem: Adaptation and devaluing the future

Quarterly Review of Biology

The selfish gene

Time discounting and time preference: A critical review

Short Communication
Patience is a virtue: Cooperative people have lower discount rates