Choose for Others More Randomly: Psychological Distancing and Response Randomness in Intertemporal Choice

Intertemporal choices involve decisions that balance trade-offs occurring at different points in time. Previous research on self–other differences in intertemporal choice, often interpreted through a psychological-distance framework, has produced mixed findings. The authors propose that part of this heterogeneity reflects systematic changes in response randomness under greater psychological distance, which can alter observed choice proportions and recovered discounting indices even when underlying time preferences are not systematically shifted. To test this response-randomness hypothesis, they conducted a pre-registered within-subject eye-tracking experiment ( N = 100), in which the participants completed the same set of monetary intertemporal choices for themselves and for an anonymous stranger. Behaviorally, the participants chose a higher proportion of the larger-later options when deciding for the anonymous stranger than when deciding for themselves. However, multiple analyses converged on increased response randomness when deciding for the anonymous stranger. The authors examined the intertemporal preferences using a standard hyperbolic discounting model and quantified choice errors as deviations from the model-predicted responses. In addition, they applied a hierarchical Bayesian implementation of dynamic decision field theory to estimate a decision threshold parameter indexing response randomness, and examined whether this parameter statistically mediated the self–other difference in choice proportions. Across the measures, the choices for others were consistently noisier. The participants produced more choice errors, and the decision threshold was lower when choosing for the anonymous stranger, indicating reduced response consistency. The differences in response randomness were strongly associated with differences in time preference across roles and mediated the effect of role on the proportion of larger-later choices. The eye-tracking results further showed reduced engagement and less systematic information search for others, indexed by shorter total dwell time, reduced information inspection, and lower systematicity of the search. Trial-level mediation further suggested that reduced information acquisition and less systematic search partially contributed to choice differences across conditions. Together, these findings indicate that socially distanced intertemporal choices are accompanied by noisier responding and altered information processing, helping to clarify why self–other patterns in the literature can appear inconsistent across tasks and analytic approaches.