Impatience and Altruism Over Hypothetical Monetary Losses

In the following paper, the relationship between impatience (measured with delay discounting procedures) and altruism (measured with social discounting procedures and behaviour of subjects in the dictator game) in the context of hypothetical monetary losses was investigated. The experiment results (sample size—164) show that contrary to our expectations, there is no significant relationship between impatience and altruistic behaviour. We, however, discovered that both immediate altruism and delayed altruism in the context of financial losses are negatively correlated with age. This inspiring result shows that older people are probably less likely to accept financial losses or participate in the social costs generated by others. The latter result needs to be carefully investigated using broader and more heterogeneous samples (especially in terms of the age of respondents).