The effect of delay and social distance in the dictator and ultimatum games

The previous research shows that delaying a reward in the dictator game contributes to less generous offers. If the reason for such results is temporal discounting, it can be expected that the effect of delay would be stronger for persons with a higher discounting rate, as well as the analogous pattern should occur in the ultimatum game. The participants of our study took decisions in the dictator and ultimatum game as proposers and responders. We manipulated delay of a reward (from immediate to in 5 years) and social distance (from the closest person to known only by sight). We observed the expected but weak interaction effect between delay and temporal discounting. However, the correlational analyses did not confirm the significant relationship between temporal discounting and decisions taken in dictator and ultimatum games. Moreover, the offers decline with the social distance, both in the dictator and ultimatum game. However, the social distance does not affect the value of the accepted offer in the ultimatum game. Such a discrepancy between donors’ behaviour and beneficiaries’ expectations may form a subtle but significant failure of the real-world donation markets.