The Influence Of Giving Time To Help Others On Intertemporal Decision Making

Altruistic behavior is referred to as one’s offering self-resources to benefit others.Previous studies have advocated altruists benefit indirectly from the external pathways,such as reputation,cooperation opportunities,etc.,which are uncontrollable,uncertain and delayed,and the evidence of the direct benefits from the internal pathways gradually become a cause for concern which can better the understanding of the altruistic behavior comprehensively.Therefore,this study takes the relationship between the time-spending altruistic behavior and the intertemporal decision-making as an example to explore the benefits that altruism brings to altruists from the cognitive perspective.Two experiments,both carried out by between-subject design,are included.Experiment 1 takes the type of time-spending as the independent variable,and divides it into three groups: the for-others group,the for-oneself group and the baseline group,totally recruiting 159 participants to complete the recalling-and-writing task,as well as the selection paradigm of intertemporal decision-making to preliminarily discuss the relationship between the time-spending altruistic behavior and the intertemporal decision-making.Based on the procedure of experiment 1,experiment 2 adds the measurement of self-efficacy and time-resource perception to further explore the psychological mechanism of the target relationship,recruiting 119 participants at last.The results of experiment 1 show that giving time to help others significantly lowers the altruist’s time-discount rate.Experiment 2,tested by the mediation model,further verifies the results of experiment 1,also finding out that self-efficacy and timeresource perception play a chain mediating role during the process.That is,giving time to others can give rise to the increase of self-efficacy and the time resource perception,causing a decrease of the time-discount rate.Therefore,this study proves that people who give time to help others can benefit from the behaviors by improving their self-efficacy,promoting their time resource perception,and then intending to choose the delayed but larger rewards in the intertemporal decision-making,which is conducive to the individual’s long-term orientation,strongly supporting the fact that helping others is also beneficial to the helpers themselves,and expanding the understanding and awareness of the internal pathways from the cognitive perspective.