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

心理学家有用实验来解释人类行为的悠久传统。最近，经济学家和人类学家已经开始在该领域使用实验室实验来衡量在程式化情况下的偏好和决策。虽然有价值，但这些研究很少评估实验结果是否能预测实践。本研究通过实验测量个体的耐心（个人时间偏好），并评估实验测量是否与实际行为相关。在人类行为的实验评估和观察到的实践之间建立联系，将从经验上加强这类实验的有用性，这些实验往往比观察性研究更灵活，成本更低。该项目将评估个人耐心的自我认知以及耐心对行为的影响；实验估计加蓬四个农村地区男性和女性的耐心；通过实验确定“双曲线”个体，即那些表现出时间偏好逆转的个体，特别是对未来的权衡表现出比当前权衡更高的耐心；并将实验中的耐心指标与参与者观察到的储蓄、在学校教育、健康和儿童方面的投资、自然资源的使用和三年内的饮酒情况联系起来。该项目之所以研究加蓬的农村社区，是因为：a)几乎所有关于人类耐心的研究都来自工业社会的主流人群；b)研究人员将能够将这项研究的结果与一项平行研究进行比较，该研究将使用相同的方法，而不需要额外的费用，在玻利维亚的提斯曼美洲印第安人中进行的研究中也将使用相同的方法。这些研究人员包括一名人类生态学家、一名文化人类学家、一名心理学家和一名实验和发展经济学家，他们将在加蓬工作3年。这项研究将开发和测试新的方法来评估耐心及其对行为的影响，这些方法结合了心理学、经济学和生态学的见解；将增加我们对教育、健康、年龄、性别、收入、财富和土地保有权安全在决定个人时间偏好中的作用的理解；将比更常见的横断面方法更准确地估计出耐心的原因和后果，因为它将从相同的受试者中获得重复的耐心测量；将有助于就时间偏好在储蓄、教育投资、保健和儿童、药物滥用、犯罪和自然资源使用方面的作用进行辩论；将首次详细说明影响耐心的因素以及耐心在调节储蓄、教育和保健投资、药物滥用、犯罪和自然资源使用方面的作用；并将包括对一些美国人类学博士生进行多学科实验和实地调查观察方法培训的更广泛影响。

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.