Cooperating with the future: Identifying the psychological and neural bases of intertemporal prosocial behavior

The purpose of this project is to study, determine, and understand the temporal structure of prosocial decisions, such as trust, cooperation, moral choice. This means for example to compare how people would trust other persons today, tomorrow, in one year, and so on.

Time is crucial to consider here (for prosocial decisions) because temporal perspective deeply influences many of the core components of these decisions, including emotions, beliefs, norms, and self-view.

We will conduct a series of behavioral- and neuroeconomic lab experiments specially designed to capture the temporal dimension of prosocial behavior, and overlay with theoretically motivated manipulations to uncover underlying decision-making processes.

This includes using transcranial magnetic stimulation to “silence” brain regions thought to be important for construction of both temporal and social context. We then map this out against lower-level cognitive manipulations theoretically targeting the same underlying function. This systematic, rigorous approach will enable us to understand how prosocial decisions are shaped by time.

This is a three-year project conducted by a research team with expert knowledge of the field and extensive combined research experience. The proposed work and overall approach is unique, timely and important.

It bridges the gap between two of the largest literatures in behavioral social science (temporal discounting and prosocial behavior) that to date in fact saw very little overlap.