The Influence Of Psychological Distance On Intertemporal Choice In Micro-financial Decision Under Gain And Loss Situations

Intertemporal choice has always been a hot research topic in the field of decision making. As the advent of "Yuebao", micro-financial products are more popular than before. To buy financial products is also a kind of intertemporal choice which is in choice between get the wealth right now or to delay the wealth and get more in future. Furthermore, in the field of financial services, people not only make decisions for themselves but also make decisions for others, i.e. financial consultant to introduce investment portfolio. Visibility, psychological distance is key factor to be considered in financial decision-making. However, from the views of previous studies, there are many disputes regarding to the effect of psychological distance on intertemporal choice. Most previous studies focused on the gain situation when conducting intertemporal choices experiments, and paid less effort to examining the loss situation. Therefore, it is necessary to split the intertemporal choice into two different situations in order to fill up the gap of previous studies.In this paper, Experiment1and Experiment2applied two different ways to change the psychological distance. The Experiment1adjusted the Construal Level; the Experiment2introduced the cutting edge IOS scaling in control of the psychological distance between self and other. By referencing the intertemporal choice in the field of economics, a number of gain and loss situations were designed in the experiments to investigate the changes of time preference and cognitive mechanism under different conditions.The major findings are:(1) No matter how to change the psychological distance, for individuals in loss situation, temporal discounting is significantly higher than income situation, namely individuals prefer loss immediately in loss situation while prefer gain in future in gain situation.(2) In gain situation, psychological distance has an impact on the intertemporal preference. Reducing psychological distance weakens temporal discounting (3) In loss situation, psychological distance have little impact on the intertemporal preference. Thus, the effect of psychological distance in loss situation differs from that in gain situation. Results of my research have similarities with previous view of Kim, Schnall and White in2013, which is similar psychological distance reduces the temporal discounting in gain situation, that can also be exemplified by "psychological distance exchange model". However, in the loss situation these phenomena were not found, that explained the divergence of impact of psychological distance between gain and loss situations in risk decision can be also found in the intertemporal choice. Finally, the result of aforesaid experiments were analyzed and discussed from different angles such as value function model, construal-level theory and the neural mechanism of intertemporal choice. Meantime, the practical use of intertemporal choice was discussed at the last part.