The effects of intertemporal and interpersonal distance on choice

在团队合作效率高的环境中，合作对生产力和经济福祉至关重要。同样，耐心对经济繁荣至关重要，因为它使个人能够为未来进行充分的储蓄和投资。不幸的是，社会合作的失败(自私)和自我控制的失败(冲动或上瘾)是美国社会普遍存在的问题。在这里进行的研究开发和扩展了一个决策模型，在这个模型中，合作与自私的决策与耐心与不耐烦的决策之间存在着密切的对应关系。合作和耐心是从“我们应该做什么”的角度来思考的，在这种情况下，跨期选择中的“我们”是一个人现在和未来的自我。自私和不耐烦的行为是由“我应该做什么”的想法所驱动的。建模方法表明，这两个领域的经济利益行为可能是通过培训或以其他方式诱导人们以一种方式而不是另一种方式来制定决策的。所提出的研究假设，跨时间和人际合作是自我在时间和社会空间两个维度上的延伸。时间的延伸导致自我控制，社会空间的延伸导致社会合作和利他主义。许多实验将建立这两个维度的定量关系，并能够对通过沿这两个维度进行折扣而创建的曲面进行建模。该模式将使人们更广泛地了解跨期和社会偏好的性质。

Cooperation are critical to productivity and economic well-being in settings where teamwork is efficient. Likewise, patience is critical to economic prosperity to the extent it enables individuals to adequately save and invest for the future. Unfortunately, failure of social cooperation (selfishness) and failure of self-control (impulsiveness or addiction) are pervasive problems in American society. The research undertaken here develops and extends a model of decision making in which there is a close correspondence between decisions to behave cooperatively versus selfishly and decisions to behave patiently versus impatiently. Cooperation and patience are motivated by thinking in terms of "what we should do" where the "we" in intertemporal choices are one's current and future selves. Selfish and impatient behavior is motivated by thinking in terms of "what I should do." The modeling approach suggests that economically beneficial behaviors in both domains may be brought about by training or otherwise inducing people to frame decisions one way versus the other.The proposed research posits that intertemporal and interpersonal cooperation are extensions of the self along the two dimensions: time and social space. Extension in time leads to self-control; extension in social space leads to social cooperation and altruism. A number of experiments will establish the quantitative relationship of these two dimensions and enable modeling of the surface created by discounting along both of them. The model will lead to a wider understanding of that nature of intertemporal and social preferences.