Social and Temporal Discounting and Ambience Effects

This repository contains the code and documentation for my first PhD project, which explores the phenomenon of Social Discounting. Jones & Rachlin (2006) demonstrated that individuals' willingness to forgo personal rewards in favor of benefiting others decreases hyperbolically with increasing social distance. In the current project, we will raise two questions: 1- Is there a relationship between social discounting and temporal discounting? 2- Do ambient temperature differences influence social discounting behavior?

Repository Structure

socialDiscounting/
├── simulations/           # Contains code and documentation for power analysis
├── experiment/            # Contains code for the online experiment
└── README.md             # This file

Simulations

Define the Hyperbolic Social Discounting Model

The model from Jones & Rachlin (2006):

$$ v = \frac{V}{1 + sN} $$

Where:

• v: Amount forgone (generosity) for a person at social distance ( N )
• V: Baseline generosity (intercept at ( N = 0 ))
• s: Social discounting rate (how generosity decreases with ( N ))
• N: Social distance (1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100)

Simulation of Social Discounting Data

Set priors based on Jones & Rachlin (2006):

Parameters

Social Premium - Amount foregone (V): Assign individual baseline generosity values $V \sim \text{Normal}(83,, 5)$ Social Discounting Rate (s): Randomly sample s : $s \sim \text{Normal}(0.05,, 0.02)$

Notes

• Social distances (N) are discrete values from the original study (Jones & Rachlin, 2006)
• Priors are based on the empirical estimates from previous literature

References

Jones, B., & Rachlin, H. (2006). Social Discounting. Psychological Science, 17(4), 283-286.