Sharing with a stranger: people are more generous with time than money

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the present study, we tested whether generosity changes dependent on money or time being shared. During the experiment, participants N = 371 (MAge = 37.5 years, 38.8% female) completed questionnaires measuring social value orientation, moral identity centrality, and honesty-humility. The opportunity cost of time spent on a real effort task was measured with an incentivized method. Then, participants played two versions of a dictator game: either in a standard dictator game, where participants could share payoffs from the real effort task; or in a time dictator game, where participants decided how long they want to work for another participant’s payoff. We tested three hypotheses. (a) Time and money are not equivalent, and participants are more generous with time than with money. (b) Giving time results in higher positive affect than giving money. (c) Participants’ social value orientation, moral identity centrality, and honesty-humility explain the difference between the donations of time and money, and personality traits will have a stronger impact on time decisions than on monetary decisions. We found that approximately 50% of participants were more generous when giving time, this effect was not dependent on the opportunity cost of time. We think that our experiment is the first experiment to unambiguously show this effect. Furthermore, generosity was not related to positive affect and we found no moderating effect of personality traits.