Abstract:To examine whether public crises would affect university students’ intertemporal decision, and how socioeconomic status moderated the influence of crises on intertemporal decision making, Experiment 1 investigated the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on university students’ intertemporal choices by a field quasi-experiment; Experiment 2 further investigated the moderated role of subjective socioeconomic status in the lab. Two experiments found that: (1) after the outbreak ofthe COVID-19, the delay discounting of intertemporal choice increased significantly first and then decreased as theCOVID-19 gradually being controlled, even though the delay discounting was still higher than that before the outbreak of the COVID-19; (2) Subjective socioeconomic status moderated the impact of public crises on university students’ intertemporal choice. Specifically, university students withhigher socioeconomic status were not affected by public crises, while those with lower socioeconomic status preferred SS more during crises.