Legacy motivations & the psychology of intergenerational decisions.

Critical issues in society today involve long time horizons and multiple generations of people. A central challenge in intergenerational decisions is that the interests of present and future generations are not always aligned. The goals and focus of research on intergenerational decisions has been to (1) identify the key features of intergenerational decisions and use those insights to develop experiments that emulate those features, (2) identify the central barriers to intergenerational beneficence, and importantly, (3) identify variables that lead people to act on the behalf of future generations, void of any material or economic incentive to do so. Critically, intergenerational contexts are characterized by the intersection of intertemporal and interpersonal dimensions, which enables the enactment of legacy motivations-a key underlying force in overcoming the many barriers to intergenerational beneficence.

It's only a matter of time: death, legacies, and intergenerational decisions.

Intergenerational decisions affect other people in the future. The combination of intertemporal and interpersonal distance between decision makers in the present and other people in the future may lead one to expect little intergenerational generosity. In the experiments reported here, however, we posited that the negative effect of intertemporal distance on intergenerational beneficence would be reversed when people were primed with thoughts of death. This reversal would occur because death priming leads individuals to be concerned with having a lasting impact on other people in the future. Our experiments show that when individuals are exposed to death priming, the expected tendency to allocate fewer resources to others in the future, as compared with others in the present, is reversed. Our findings suggest that legacy motivations triggered by death priming can trump intergenerational discounting tendencies and promote intergenerational beneficence.

The egoism and altruism of intergenerational behavior.

Some of the most important issues in society today affect more than one generation of people. In this article, the authors offer a conceptual overview and integration of the research on intergenerational dilemmas-decisions that entail a tradeoff between one's own self-interest in the present and the interests of other people in the future. Intergenerational decisions are characterized by a combination of intertemporal (i.e., behaviors that affect the future) and interpersonal (i.e., behaviors that affect other people) components. Research on intergenerational dilemmas identifies factors that emerge from these dimensions and how they interact with each other to influence intergenerational beneficence. Critically, phenomena that result from the intersection of these two dimensions-such as immortality striving through legacy creation-are especially important in distinguishing intergenerational decisions from other related decision contexts.

Cognitions and behavior in asymmetric social dilemmas: a comparison of two cultures.

This study investigated whether cognitions and behavior in an asymmetric social dilemma can be predicted by national culture. Results indicated that, as predicted, groups of decision makers from Japan--a collectivist, hierarchical culture-were more cooperative, expected others to be more cooperative, and were more likely to adopt an equal allocation distribution rule to resolve the dilemma than were groups of decision makers from the United States-an individualist, egalitarian culture. An opportunity for communication had a greater impact on expectations of others' behavior in groups of U.S. decision makers than in groups of Japanese decision makers.