The role of future planning, patience, and risk tolerance for prospective reciprocity in human adults

The current study aimed to test a suite of psychological proximate mechanisms thought to underlie prospective reciprocity - engaging in cooperative acts with the anticipation that benefits will be returned in the future. We developed and validated a novel online test battery with 297 participants to assess individual differences in three domains (planning, patience, risk tolerance) and their relation to participants' responses across different prospective reciprocity tasks. Tasks assessing patience showed high internal consistency and were positively associated with cooperative behaviour across all three prospective reciprocity tasks. The pattern was less clear for risk, with associations varying across tasks, and planning ability was negatively correlated with one prospective reciprocity task. Across the prospective reciprocity tasks, performance showed limited convergence, indicating that forward-looking cooperative behavior is context dependent rather than reflecting a unitary, domain-general tendency. Taken together, our results show that planning, patience, and risk tolerance each contribute to forward-looking cooperation in task-specific ways, underscoring the need for improved psychometric approaches.