Do experiments predict practice? Evaluating the influence of patience on human behavior in Gabon

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Psychologists have a long tradition of using experiments to explain human behavior. Recently, economists and anthropologists have started to use laboratory experiments in the field to measure preferences and decisions under stylized situations. Though valuable, these studies rarely assess whether results from experiments predict practices. This study uses experiments to measure individuals' patience (personal time preference), and assess whether experimental measures correlate with actual behavior. Establishing a link between experimental assessments of human behavior and observed practice would empirically reinforce the usefulness of such experiments, that are often more flexible and less expensive to undertake than are observational studies. The project will assess self-perceptions of individual patience and the influence patience has over behavior; experimentally estimate the patience of men and women in four rural areas in Gabon; experimentally identify "hyperbolic" individuals, those who exhibit time preference reversals, specifically exhibiting higher levels of patience for future tradeoffs than for current tradeoffs; and correlate the measures of patience from the experiment with participant's observed savings, investments in schooling, health, and children, use of natural resources, and alcohol use over three years. The project studies rural communities in Gabon because: a) nearly all studies of patience among humans come from mainstream populations of industrial societies and b) the researchers will be able to compare results of this research with a parallel study using the same methods that will be added, at no additional cost, to ongoing work among Tsimane' Amerindians in Bolivia. The researchers include a human ecologist, a cultural anthropologist, a psychologist, and an experimental and development economist who will work in Gabon during 3 years. This research will develop and test new methods for assessing patience and its influence on behavior that combine insights from psychology, economics, and ecology; will add to our understanding of the role of education, health, age, gender, income, wealth, and land tenure security in determining personal time preference; will obtain more accurate estimates of the causes and consequences of patience than are possible with the more common cross-sectional approach because it will obtain repeated measures of patience from the same subjects; will contribute to the debate about the role of time preference in savings, investment in schooling, health and children, drug abuse, crime and natural resource use; will provide the first detailed ethnographic account of the factors that influence patience and the role of patience in mediating savings, investment in schooling and health, drug abuse, crime and natural resource use; and will include the broader impact of training a number of US Ph.D. students in anthropology in multi-disciplinary experimental and observational methods of field enquiry.