时间定价对亲社会行为的影响

The Effects of Accounting for Time on Prosocial Behaviors

时间定价就是将金钱价格赋予时间之上,用金钱来衡量时间的价值。已有研究表明,时间定价激活时间经济价值最大化的心理定势,使个体更看重时间的经济回报,花更少的时间帮助他人。但是,时间定价对亲社会行为的影响可能并不仅仅局限于时间利他。本研究通过三个实验,除了考察时间定价对时间利他的影响外,还进一步探讨时间定价对金钱利他的影响。结果显示,时间定价不仅影响个体的时间利他行为,也削弱了金钱利他行为。这表明,时间定价所激活的经济效用心理定势不仅仅局限于时间这一种资源的效用。

Previous research demonstrated that, by activating an economic utility mindset of time, accounting for time induced individu-als to spend less time on others. However, the influence of accounting for time on prosocial behaviors may extend beyond simply howtime is spent. In this study, we not only retested the effect of billing time on time spent helping others, but also explored the effect ondonation. The first study sampled 29 college students. Participants engaged in a consulting task, where they made mock personnel decisionsfor a fictitious company. Participants were randomly assigned to either a non - billing control condition or a billing - time treatment con-dition. They engaged in a nearly identical consulting activity in both conditions, except that participants in the billing - time conditionkept a log cataloging ＂specifically what you have done and how much each office＇s budget should be charged for that time every ten mi-nutes. ＂ Next, participants appraised the extent of fatigue and their mood, and then completed the assessment of helping behaviors. Re-suits showed that participants in the billing- time condition spent less time than others. The present results are consistent with the re-cent findings that people who evaluate their time in terms of money spend less time on others. A total of 47 participants took part in the second study. The procedure was identical with the first study, except that the dependentvariable became money spent helping others. Results showed that participants in the billing - time condition spent less money on others.The third study sampled 332 participants who had worked for more than one year from network. Participants in the time/money conditioncalculated their hourly wage. In contrast, participants who were assigned to the control condition proceeded directly to the rest of thestudy session. Subsequent to the manipulation, participants responded to a measure of money spent helping. Results showed that partic-ipants who calculated their hourly wage would spend less money on others, after statistically controlling for individual differences andother covariates. The present study revealed that, for individuals who had worked, putting price on time also influenced their willingnessto spend money on others. Therefore, we conclude that accounting for time not only induces individuals to spend less time on others, but also reducedparticipants＇ willingness to spend money to help others. This indicated that billing time activated a mindset of economic utility maximiza-tion that was not limited to the value of time.