Discounting of delayed and probabilistic gains and losses by poor and wealthy people

Previous research has found that older adults with lower income discounted hypothetical delayed rewards significantly faster than older adults with higher income. The aim of the present research was to investigate further the relationship between income level and the rate of discounting of delayed and probabilistic gains and losses. Two experiments are reported. The first experiment addresses the question whether relatively poor and relatively wealthy people differ in the rates at which they discount delayed and probabilistic gains. The second study addresses an analogous question, however in the domain of delayed and probabilistic losses. Consistently, both experiments have shown that people with lower income discounted the value of delayed and probabilistic gains and delayed losses at a higher rate than people with higher income level did. In the case of probabilistic losses no significant differences between groups were found. The correlative nature of the experiments does not allow, however, to draw a conclusion about the direction of the cause and effect relation between the two variables: the income level and the rate of discounting.