Regret Now, Compensate It Later: The Benefits of Experienced Regret on Future Altruism

Abstract

This article explores how experienced regret and relief evoked in a risky gambling task influence subsequent intertemporal pro-social behavior. We apply a dictator game experiment with delayed rewards to investigate the effect on donating behavior by simultaneously the time delay when the recipient accepts the donation and the emotions experienced by the participant. We examine this effect using a choice titration procedure. The results reveal that independent of the prior experienced emotions, participants’ donations decrease as the time delay rises; the hyperbolic model provides a better explanation of this finding. Significantly, experienced regret impacts the shape of the social discount function with delayed rewards, which is reflected in notably different discount rates. Participants who experienced regret exhibit a lower discount rate than those in the relief condition. Note that this distinct type of generosity differs significantly at the 14-day delay but not at the shortest and longest. It follows that regret can promote future altruism and intertemporal pro-social behavior, depending on the delay.

Can you change my generosity towards future others? The impact of observability on intertemporal pro‐social decisions

“…The current study investigated the impact of decision observability on intertemporal pro‐social decisions. Overall, the experimental results were consistent with prior research on intertemporal altruism (Lu et al, 2023, 2022). Subjects in the Anonymous and Observable groups were willing to forgo a certain amount of their own money to benefit others.…”

“…We conducted an intertemporal pro-social discounting task using a recent variant of the dictator game, known as the dictator game with delayed rewards, which has been validated among Chinese subjects (Lu et al, 2023(Lu et al, , 2022. The novelty of this variant is to postpone payment in the dictator game, thereby creating a time delay between the participant's decision-making time (the experiment) and the recipient's time to accept the donation (the delayed treatment variable).…”

“…In economic literature, such delays are termed "intertemporal choices" and are frequently employed to analyze the role of time (Soman et al, 2005). To date, the impact of intertemporal choices on social preferences has been investigated in various contexts, such as charitable donations (Breman, 2011), dictator games (Lu et al, 2022), and public goods games (Barfuss et al, 2020). These studies have conducted diverse methodologies, including laboratory experiments (Lu et al, 2023), online surveys (Capra et al, 2022), and field studies (Breman, 2011), while sampling from different populations like students (Lu et al, 2022), registered donors of charitable organizations (Lu et al, 2023), and nationally representative samples (Chopra et al, 2021).…”

“…However, the existing evidence becomes puzzling from a “big picture” perspective. Several studies hypothesized that generosity decreases in a non‐constant hyperbolic fashion across time delays (e.g., Kovarik, 2009; Lu et al, 2023, 2022; Ogawa & Ida, 2015). By contrast, some studies do the exact opposite (e.g., Andreoni & Serra‐Garcia, 2021; Breman, 2011), yet others find no effect (Kölle & Lauer, 2019).…”

Time Matters: Time Perspectives Predict Intertemporal Prosocial Preferences

“…Moreover, our research also probes whether the influence of time perspective traits on intertemporal prosocial discounting occurs at the evaluation or comparison stage. For this purpose, we employed the recently developed Dictator Game with Delayed Rewards [24].The Chinese version of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory [25] was utilized to categorize groups based on different time orientations, enabling an examination of the characteristics and disparities of participants' behavior preferences in intertemporal prosocial choices.…”