Empathy promotes altruistic behavior in economic interactions.
Ontology highlight
ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Klimecki OM
PROVIDER: S-EPMC5005993 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Impaired decision-making has recently gained recognition as a component of the suicidal diathesis. Yet, although precipitants and particularly deterrents to suicidal behavior are often interpersonal, little is known about social decision-making in suicidal individuals. This study employed a novel version of the Ultimatum Game to investigate how empathy moderates responses to social conflict in 149 older adults, comprising groups of suicide attempters (n = 49), suicide ideators (n = 32), non-suicidal depressed controls (n = 33), and a non-psychiatric control group (n = 35). Participants acted as responder to a series of single-shot financial offers that varied in fairness. Some offers were paired with social context information on the proposer, designed to evoke either empathy or punishment. Offer acceptance was sensitive to Fairness and Social Context, such that participants accepted more offers in the empathy condition and fewer offers in the punishment condition. A Group * Context interaction was observed, wherein the suicide attempters adjusted their acceptance rates less in the empathy condition than the non-psychiatric controls. Thus, older adults with a history of suicide attempt were less influenced by empathy scenarios, indicating that a failure to integrate others' emotions into decisions may undermine social deterrents to suicide.
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Project description:BackgroundObesity is a worldwide public health issue, not only because it is associated with numerous comorbid diseases but also because of its impact on the social level. This study aims to investigate (a) whether altruistic behavior differs between people with obesity and people who are not obese, (b) altruistic behavior toward people who are obese, in particular, women who are obese, and (c) implicit and explicit attitudes toward people with obesity as predictors for divergent altruistic behavior.MethodsAn experimental approach called the dictator game was applied. In total, 168 participants of normal weight were asked to divide a monetary reward between themselves and two opponents, one person who was obese and one with normal weight. In addition, participants' implicit and explicit attitudes toward people with obesity as well as other sociodemographic data were assessed.ResultsWe found that altruistic behavior did not differ between obese and nonobese opponents (t(166) = -0.57, p = 0.71), nor did we find less altruistic attitudes toward women with obesity (t(85) = -0.03, p = 0.39). Linear regression models show less altruistic behavior among people with stronger explicit antifat attitudes (p = 0.015). However, although we found that participants held implicit attitudes toward people with obesity, these attitudes did not predict altruistic behavior toward people with obesity.ConclusionAlthough numerous studies reported discrimination toward people with obesity in several areas of life, we did not find discrimination in form of less altruistic behavior toward people with obesity. Moreover, although we found implicit antifat attitudes among the participants, these attitudes did not predict altruistic behavior toward people of divergent weight groups. Therefore, future research should investigate more intensively the diverse facets of discrimination toward people with obesity, if and to what extent implicit antifat attitudes have a quantifiable impact on the stigmatization and or discrimination process, and the hypotheses in a more hidden way, since manipulation check revealed that the majority of participants anticipated the underlying idea of the dictator game.
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Project description:Compassion, the emotional response of caring for another who is suffering and that results in motivation to relieve suffering, is thought to be an emotional antecedent to altruistic behavior. However, it remains unclear whether compassion enhances altruistic behavior in a uniform way or is specific to sub-types of behavior such as altruistic helping of a victim or altruistic punishment of a transgressor. We investigated the relationship between compassion and subtypes of altruistic behavior using third-party paradigms where participants (1) witnessed an unfair economic exchange between a transgressor and a victim, and (2) had the opportunity to either spend personal funds to either economically (a) help the victim or (b) punish the transgressor. In Study 1, we examined whether individual differences in self-reported empathic concern (the emotional component of compassion) was associated with greater altruistic helping or punishment behavior in two independent samples. For participants who witnessed an unfair transaction, trait empathic concern was associated with greater helping of a victim and had no relationship to punishment. However, in those who decided to punish the transgressor, participants who reported greater empathic concern decided to punish less. In Study 2, we directly enhanced compassion using short-term online compassion meditation training to examine whether altruistic helping and punishment were increased after two weeks of training. Compared to an active reappraisal training control group, the compassion training group gave more to help the victim and did not differ in punishment of the transgressor. Together, these two studies suggest that compassion is related to greater altruistic helping of victims and is not associated with or may mitigate altruistic punishment of transgressors.
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Project description:Predictions which invoke evolutionary mechanisms are hard to test. Agent-based modeling in artificial life offers a way to simulate behaviors and interactions in specific physical or social environments over many generations. The outcomes have implications for understanding adaptive value of behaviors in context. Pain-related behavior in animals is communicated to other animals that might protect or help, or might exploit or predate. An agent-based model simulated the effects of displaying or not displaying pain (expresser/nonexpresser strategies) when injured and of helping, ignoring, or exploiting another in pain (altruistic/nonaltruistic/selfish strategies). Agents modeled in MATLAB interacted at random while foraging (gaining energy); random injury interrupted foraging for a fixed time unless help from an altruistic agent, who paid an energy cost, speeded recovery. Environmental and social conditions also varied, and each model ran for 10,000 iterations. Findings were meaningful in that, in general, contingencies that evident from experimental work with a variety of mammals, over a few interactions, were replicated in the agent-based model after selection pressure over many generations. More energy-demanding expression of pain reduced its frequency in successive generations, and increasing injury frequency resulted in fewer expressers and altruists. Allowing exploitation of injured agents decreased expression of pain to near zero, but altruists remained. Decreasing costs or increasing benefits of helping hardly changed its frequency, whereas increasing interaction rate between injured agents and helpers diminished the benefits to both. Agent-based modeling allows simulation of complex behaviors and environmental pressures over evolutionary time.
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