Aging and altruism in intertemporal choice.

In addition to making decisions about gains and losses that affect only ourselves, we often make decisions that affect others. Research on life span changes in motivation suggests that altruistic motives become stronger with age, but no prior research has examined how altruism affects tolerance for temporal delays. Experiment 1 used a realistic financial decision making task involving choices for gains, losses, and donations. Each decision required an intertemporal choice between a smaller-immediate and a larger-later option. Participants more often chose the larger-later option in the context of donations than in the context of losses; thus, parting with more of their overall capital when the act of doing so benefited a charity. As predicted, the magnitude of this "altruism effect" was amplified in older relative to younger adults. This pattern was replicated in a second experiment that was conducted online to minimize the influence of demand characteristics. Overall, these findings add to the literature on an age-related increase in altruism, and are the first to demonstrate its effects on intertemporal choice. (PsycINFO Database Record