Dreading the pain of others? Altruistic responses to others' pain underestimate dread.

Giles W Story,Ara Darzi,Ivo Vlaev,Raymond J Dolan,Rony Chowdhury,Molly Crockett,Zeb Kurth‐Nelson

doi:10.1002/jeab.721

Abstract

A dislike of waiting for pain, aptly termed 'dread', is so great that people will increase pain to avoid delaying it. However, despite many accounts of altruistic responses to pain in others, no previous studies have tested whether people take delay into account when attempting to ameliorate others' pain. We examined the impact of delay in 2 experiments where participants (total N=130) specified the intensity and delay of pain either for themselves or another person. Participants were willing to increase the experimental pain of another participant to avoid delaying it, indicative of dread, though did so to a lesser extent than was the case for their own pain. We observed a similar attenuation in dread when participants chose the timing of a hypothetical painful medical treatment for a close friend or relative, but no such attenuation when participants chose for a more distant acquaintance. A model in which altruism is biased to privilege pain intensity over the dread of pain parsimoniously accounts for these findings. We refer to this underestimation of others' dread as a 'Dread Empathy Gap'.

Highlights

A dislike of waiting for pain, aptly termed ‘dread’, is so great that people will increase pain to avoid delaying it
In the aforementioned study we found that the average participant showed hyperaltruism (κ > 1) with respect to the pain of close others; altruism diminished with increasing social distance, such that κ was below 1 with respect to others at social distance #50
Across two experiments, we examined how people attempt to relieve others’ delayed pain

Summary

Introduction

A dislike of waiting for pain, aptly termed ‘dread’, is so great that people will increase pain to avoid delaying it. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript Despite empirical support for the existence of dread (Berns et al, 2006), no previous studies have formally examined whether people consider dread when evaluating others’ pain. People are known to mount anticipatory responses to upcoming pain in others (Caes et al, 2012) These findings suggest people will act to relieve others’ dread—that is, people will choose to expedite others’ pain when that pain is unavoidable. If a tendency to relieve others’ dread is sufficiently strong, people should even be willing to increase another’s pain to mitigate delay

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Conclusion