Associations between socioeconomic status and time, risk, and social decision-making

Theories abound about the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and decision-making, but there is little empirical consensus on the nature and direction of any relationships between SES and time, risk, and social decision-making. These empirical inconsistencies may partly stem from difficulties in robustly capturing SES's multidimensionality and rigorously measuring time, risk, and social preferences. We aimed to clarify how SES affects decision-making by incorporating several objective and subjective measures of current and childhood SES, along with validated economic choice tasks that can accurately estimate individual preferences in a model-based manner, across three pre-registered studies (total N =3010) powered to detect small associations (i.e., |r| = 0.10). In Study 1, we found that SES is associated with time but not risk or social preferences. In Study 2, we found no associations between SES and preferences for risk or ambiguity. In Study 3, we found associations between SES and time preferences across monetary, health, and social rewards. Additionally, we discovered that different aspects of SES (education versus financial strain) influence time preferences via different psychological considerations (opportunity costs versus risks and pressing needs). Thus, we observe strong and specific links between SES and domain-general time preferences that can be traced to multiple psychological pathways but find little evidence for broader effects of SES on risky and social decisions.