Abstract: The study investigated whether putting a price on time modulated the effect of subjective time progression on altruistic behaviors. To address this issue, participants were asked to make personnel decisions (i.e., hire, retirement, and transfer) for different offices. After the decisions, half of the participants were assigned to a billing time condition, in which they had to calculate the total money charged to each office according to charged rates and spent time. This manipulation did not apply to the participants in the non-billing condition. Subsequently, all the participants were asked to help the experimenters to classify several pictures into scene and animal pictures, without any compensations. Subjective time progression was manipulated by accelerating (time flies) or decelerating the timer (time drags). The results showed that participants in the billing time condition generally spent less time in finishing pictorial classification than participants in the non-billing condition. More importantly, the spent time in the billing time condition was even less in the “time flies” condition than in the “time drags” condition, whereas this difference was not significant in the non-billing condition. The findings might indicate that putting a price on time enhances individuals’ subjective value of time, particularly when time flies.

Key words: putting a price on time, subjective time, altruistic behaviors

摘要： 采用筛选图片时间任务作为被试利他意愿的指标，考察在两种主观时间流逝速度（时间飞逝和时间缓慢）条件下，被试（时间定价组和非时间定价组）对利他行为的影响。结果发现，非时间定价组在时间飞逝和缓慢条件下利他行为差异不显著，但是时间定价组在时间飞逝条件下比在时间缓慢条件下利他行为时间明显较短。结果表明，时间定价组在时间飞逝条件下充分显现时间的价值，减少利他时间，而在时间缓慢条件下，在可接受的时间成本范围内，被试表现出较为乐于助人，证实了主观时间流逝速度会对个体利他行为产生影响。

关键词: 时间定价, 主观时间, 利他行为