Delaying gratification depends on social trust

Abstract

Delaying gratification is hard, yet predictive of important life outcomes, such as academic achievement and physical health. Prominent theories focus on the role of self-control, hypersensitivity to immediate rewards, and the cost of time spent waiting. However, delaying gratification may also require trust in people delivering future rewards as promised. To test the role of social trust, participants were presented with character vignettes and faces that varied in trustworthiness, and then choose between hypothetical smaller immediate or larger delayed rewards from those characters. Across two experiments, participants were less willing to wait for delayed rewards from less trustworthy characters, and perceived trustworthiness predicted willingness to delay gratification. These findings provide the first demonstration of a causal role for social trust in willingness to delay gratification, independent of other relevant factors, such as self-control or reward history. Thus, delaying gratification requires choosing not only a later reward, but a reward that is potentially less likely to be delivered, when there is doubt about the person promising it. Implications of this work include the need to revise prominent theories of delay of gratification, and new directions for interventions with populations characterized by impulsivity.

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“…Relatively recent study by Michaelson et al [41] also support the above finding. Michaelson et al [41] found that the participant's perception of the individual who offer the reward has an effect on delay of gratification.…”

“…Since then, numerous efforts are done to understand what impulsivity constitute and to identify possible predictors. Frequently studied predictors of impulsivity include personality specifically extroversion, IQ, income age gender and social trust [1,12,[36][37][38][39][40][41]. A study done by Mischel et al [12] reveals that delay discounting decrease with increasing age in children.…”

“…It is hardly easy to find studies that address external and contextual factors which may affect delay of gratification. Apart from few researches [41,33] done on social trust and delay of gratification, almost all of the above discussed predictor variables were internal to the individual. These two studies conducted to test the role of external factors like social trust and culture difference on delay of gratification found statistically significant result.…”

“…Michaelson et al [41] found that the participant's perception of the individual who offer the reward has an effect on delay of gratification. Their experimental study finding indicated that, the more the participant consider the individual who is promising the reward as trustworthy, the better they able to choose a delayed better reward than immediate small reward.…”

Reward Processing in Motivational and Affective Disorders

“…In support of this, discount rates amongst cigarette smokers have been shown to correlate positively with their belief that the future reward will be delivered (Reynolds et al, 2007). Also, within a standard discounting questionnaire, people discount more steeply when rewards are framed as being received from fictive characters rated as untrustworthy, as opposed to from characters perceived as trustworthy (Michaelson et al, 2013).…”