Individual-specific mortality is associated with how individuals evaluate future discounting decisions.

ABSTRACT: How organisms discount the value of future rewards is associated with many important outcomes, and may be a central component of theories of life-history. According to life-history theories, prioritizing immediacy is indicative of an accelerated strategy (i.e. reaching reproductive maturity quickly and producing many offspring at the cost of long-term investment). Previous work extrapolating life-history theories to facultative calibration of life-history traits within individuals has theorized that cues to mortality can trigger an accelerated strategy; however, compelling evidence for this hypothesis in modern humans is lacking. We assessed whether country-level life expectancy predicts individual future discounting behaviour across multiple intertemporal choice items in a sample of 13 42

SUBMITTER: Lee AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6015856 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature