RAPID: The effect of a crisis on intertemporal choice

每天，人们都必须在立即得到或将来得到更好的东西之间做出选择。为度假存钱，为退休做计划，甚至为完成一个大项目而努力，都需要放弃眼前的奖励来实现长期目标。心理学家、神经科学家和经济学家研究了人们是如何做出这些决定的，探索了个人和他们的情况下，对现在和未来的重视程度是如何变化的。危机，如COVID-19在美国的传播，涉及一种独特的压力配置，可能会影响人们对现在和未来的看法。在这样的危机中，短期思维可能会产生有害的后果。研究小组正在利用一个独特而紧迫的机会来记录人们在危机期间对即时奖励和延迟奖励的选择是如何变化的。2020年1月，该团队从3000多名参与者那里收集了一个关于跨期选择的大型数据集。研究人员正在使用该数据集作为基线，研究人们在COVID-19危机期间如何在长期和短期之间转换。不同地区的不同感染率和补救策略为检验这些因素对人们如何决策的影响提供了前所未有的自然实验。通过在危机进程的多个点收集等效的数据集，以及有关当地条件和压力水平的信息，研究小组可以探索这些因素如何影响人们的决定。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.