Becky Malquist and Dr. Harold L. Miller Jr., Psychology
Do you buy the brand new car now and take out a large loan, or do you save a little longer and buy a used one so that, in the end, you pay less? Do you take the spur-of-the-moment Caribbean cruise, or do you stick to your plan to build a nest egg? Impulsivity has been defined as choosing a smaller, more immediate reinforcer over a larger but delayed one. Self-control signifies the opposite choice; it is the preference of a larger, delayed reinforcer1.
What aspects of circumstance and personality favor self-control over impulsivity? One possibility lies in aspects of the community that an individual has grown up in. Given findings that point to a relationship between urban or rural background and certain psychological characteristics 2, including economic anxieties 3, the present study examined the money-related decisions of high school students with either a rural or urban background.
A survey was administered to 61 high school juniors and seniors. Thirty-three students attended two rural high schools in eastern and central Utah, and the remaining 28 students attended two high schools in Reno, Nevada. The survey asked them to choose between two hypothetical amounts of money—a smaller sum available immediately and one available at a future date. For example, one question was “would you prefer $4.00 now or $5.00 in one week?” The survey consisted of 65 such questions, with monetary ranges of $3.75 to $1000 and delays from one day to one year.
The participants were brought one at a time into a room that had been made available at the school. The participant was then placed at one end of the room in front of a laptop computer, on which the survey was administered. Upon completion, the student was compensated for his or her time, but in a way that was essentially a real-life version of a question from the survey. The student was given the option of receiving a check good immediately for four dollars or a check for five dollars post-dated for one week later.
The survey results indicated that rural students preferred the larger, delayed reward more often than their urban counterparts. Rural participants on average selected the delayed choice on 35 of the 65 questions (54% of the time), while urban subjects selected the delayed response on 26 of the 65 questions (40% of the time).
Of further interest is an unanticipated finding within the real-life situation involving payment for participation. As mentioned above, participants were asked whether they preferred to be compensated by receiving four dollars immediately or five dollars in a week. The same question had been posed hypothetically as a survey item. The real-life choice made by each participant was compared to his or her response to the same item on the survey. Only one of the 17 subjects who had chosen five dollars on the survey switched to four dollars when the actual choice was presented. In contrast, 28 of the 39 students who had selected four dollars on the survey opted for the five-dollar check in real-life.
This preference reversal did not divide along rural and urban lines. Moreover, although it might be expected that participants would rather have had five dollars in a hypothetical situation but become impulsive and choose four dollars when presented with the actual money, the opposite was true. Students who did not want to wait for the hypothetical five dollars chose to wait when the stakes were real.
Working within time constraints was one of the most difficult obstacles for me to wade through. I would have preferred to obtain a much larger sample, but I had to figure in time to travel to the various schools and try to keep the inconvenience I was causing those schools by disrupting class time to a minimum. As it was, it usually took about an hour to survey six students—longer than I had anticipated from the basis of my pilot surveys I ran prior to the actual ones at the schools.
The statistical analysis also posed a problem for me. Upon completion of the gathering of the data, I found myself with seventy responses from sixty-one students, making for one very large matrix and no “correct” way to examine it, and I was equipped only with a rusty, rudimentary set of statistical skills. Thanks to much time and counsel from my advisor, Dr. Hal Miller, we were able to determine a method of analysis that represents the data suitably.
Despite these obstacles, the final product of my research, the results, are exciting, and the project overall went very well. There is still a great need for further exploration in this area, but I look forward to continuing this research as I commence my Master’s degree.
References
- Ainslie, G. W. (1974). Impulse control in pigeons. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 21, 485-489.
- Hoyt, D. R., O’Donnell, D., & Mack, K. Y. (1995). Psychological distress and size of place: The epidemiology of rural economic stress. Rural Sociology, 60, 707-720.
- Hraba, J., McCutcheon, A. L., & Vecernik, J. (1999). Rural and urban differences in economic experiences, anxiety and support for the post-communist reforms in the Czech and Slovak Republics. Rural Sociology, 64, 439-463.