RAPID: The effect of a crisis on intertemporal choice

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Every day people have to choose between getting something immediately or getting something even better in the future. Saving for a vacation, retirement planning, and even working towards completing a large project all require foregoing immediate rewards to achieve long-term goals. Psychologists, neuroscientists, and economists have studied how people make these decisions, exploring how the weight put on the present and the future vary across individuals and their situations. Crises, such as the spread of COVID-19 in the United States, involve a unique configuration of stresses that may influence the way that people think about the present and the future. In such crises, short-term thinking can have detrimental consequences.The research team is exploiting a unique and urgent opportunity to document how people’s choice between immediate and delayed rewards changes during a crisis. In January 2020 the team collected a large dataset on inter-temporal choice from over 3,000 participants. The researchers are using this dataset as a baseline for examining how people shift between long-term and short-term during the COVID-19 crisis. Heterogeneous infection rates and remediation strategies in different regions provide an unprecedented natural experiment for examining the impact of these factors on how people make decisions. By collecting an equivalent dataset at multiple points in the progress of the crisis, together with information about local conditions and stress levels, the reseaach team can can explore how these factors influence people’s decisions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.