| Past studies have pointed toward delay discounting as being a critical psychological factor that
contributes to poverty, but most of those studies are correlational, preventing statements about
causal relationships. Relatedly, recent research suggests that experimental manipulations that
diminish the perception of financial well-being affects delay discounting, but less is known about
whether this effect would generalize to probability discounting, which is also relevant to our
understanding of poverty. In this study, we experimentally examined how a manipulation of
perceived financial insecurity affects sensitivity to delayed and probabilistic monetary outcomes.
Adults (N= 116) were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and assigned randomly to
either a financially secure or financially insecure group in which their subjective sense of
financial security was experimentally manipulated using feedback and a writing task consistent
with group assignment. Participants then completed delay discounting and probability
discounting tasks for hypothetical monetary outcomes. Results indicated no significant
difference between the financially secure and insecure groups on the delay discounting task
while controlling for alcohol use. A logistic regression analyzing the relationship between group
assignment and probability discounting scores, while controlling for cigarette dependence,
produced a nonsignificant overall model. These results fail to replicate previous research on
perceived financial insecurity and delay discounting.
Keywords: decision making, delay discounting, probability discounting, financial security |