First Name:
Elizabeth
Last Name:
Payment
Major Department:
Psychology
Thesis Director:
Lisa Emery
Date of Thesis:
Jun 2014
Previous research has sometimes found that older adults make less apt financial decisions than young adults. Although this has been attributed to declines in cognitive functioning, in daily life older adults are quite adept at compensating for losses in cognitive functions. In this thesis, I investigated whether differences in financial decisions could be due to motivational changes in adults across the lifespan. Specifically, I investigated whether the age differences predicted by Socieoemotional Selectivity Theory (SST) or Erikson's life stage of generativity versus stagnation would predict older adults' performance in the Dictator Game and the Ultimatum Game. Neither generativity nor changes in social interactions predicted game performance, but characteristics of the game partners did influence the offers participants made and accepted. I found participants were influenced by the fairness of the offer, being more generous to people who made more fair offers. In the Dictator game, I further found that younger adults were also influenced by the age and gender of the picture of the participant, but older adults were not. This could be because younger adults are influenced by both emotional (offer fairness) and source (gender and age) information, whereas older adults are only influenced by emotional information.