Age and Negative Framing: Pitting Influences of Altruism Against Each Other

Altruistic behavior is when an individual takes into account the consumption of others as well as their own when making decisions. It has previously been demonstrated that as people age, their altruistic behavior increases. Another force that has been shown to influence the level of an individual’s altruistic behavior is framing of the information. Specifically, negative framing has been shown to increase self interested behavior and risky decision making. The current experiment investigates if an individual becomes less susceptible to the effect of framing as they age. The study implements two treatments of a positive and negative framed prisoner’s dilemma across two groups of participants: old (ages 50+) and young (ages 18-35). Two hypotheses were tested; that there would be significantly more cooperation in the old negative treatment than the young negative treatment, and that there would be no significant difference in behavior between the two frames in the old treatments. This study found no significant difference between the old negative and young negative treatments. Similarly, there was no significant difference between the old positive and old negative treatments, however, this could have been for unknown factors outside of the research question. Overall, the data did not support the hypothesis that individuals become less susceptible to negative framing as they age