Stony Brook University, USA.
J Exp Anal Behav. 2020 Jul;114(1):72-86. doi: 10.1002/jeab.614. Epub 2020 Jul 1.
Choosing a larger-later reward over a smaller-sooner reward may be thought of as altruism toward one's future self. A question that arises in this connection is: What is the relation between delay and social discounting? To begin to answer this question, social and delay discount functions need to be comparable. Delay is ordinarily measured on a ratio scale (time), which allows for meaningful division and addition. Social distance is ordinarily measured on an ordinal scale (rank order of social closeness). To convert social distance to a ratio scale we use a psychophysical distance function obtained via magnitude estimation (Stevens, 1956). The distance functions obtained are well described by a power function (median exponent = 1.9); we show how they may be used to rescale ordinal to ratio social discount functions.
选择较大、较晚的奖励而不是较小、较早的奖励，可以被视为对自己未来的利他行为。在这方面出现的一个问题是：延迟和社会折扣之间有什么关系？为了开始回答这个问题，需要使社会折扣函数和延迟折扣函数具有可比性。延迟通常在比率量表（时间）上进行测量，这允许进行有意义的划分和加法。社会距离通常在序量表（社会亲近程度的等级顺序）上进行测量。为了将社会距离转换为比率量表，我们使用通过数量估计（Stevens，1956）获得的心理物理距离函数。通过幂函数（中位数指数= 1.9）很好地描述了获得的距离函数；我们展示了如何使用它们来重新缩放顺序到比率的社会折扣函数。
