Abstract
We live busy, social lives, and meeting the challenges of our complex environments puts strain on our cognitive systems. However, cognitive resources are limited. It is unclear how cognitive load affects social decision making. Previous findings on the effects of cognitive load on other-regarding preferences have been ambiguous, allowing no coherent opinion whether cognitive load increases, decreases or does not affect prosocial considerations. Here, we suggest that social distance between individuals modulates whether generosity towards a recipient increases or decreases under cognitive load conditions. Participants played a financial social discounting task with several recipients at variable social distance levels. In this task, they could choose between generous alternatives, yielding medium financial rewards for the participant and recipient at variable social distances, or between a selfish alternative, yielding larger rewards for the participant alone. We show that the social discount function of male participants was significantly flattened under high cognitive load conditions, suggesting they distinguished less between socially close and socially distant recipients. Unexpectedly, the cognitive-load effect on social discounting was gender-specific: while social discounting was strongly dependent on cognitive load in men, women were nearly unaffected by cognitive load manipulations. We suggest that cognitive load leads men, but not women to simplify the decision problem by neglecting the social distance information. We consider our study a good starting point for further experiments exploring the role of gender in prosocial choice.
Highlights
In today’s societies, we have to accomplish a multitude of different tasks in parallel
We show that the social discount function of male participants was significantly flattened under high cognitive load conditions, suggesting they distinguished less between socially close and socially distant recipients
The goal of the current experiment was to identify the effect of cognitive load on social discounting, i.e. on social distance-dependent generosity
Summary
In today’s societies, we have to accomplish a multitude of different tasks in parallel. We are on the phone with a business partner while simultaneously scanning through the headlines of the newspaper, drinking our coffee and keeping upcoming duties in mind–all at the same time. In this state of mind, we have to make decisions that might affect our own future, but very often, our choices impact other people in our social environment. The question arising is how we deal with the strain of cognitive load when making social decisions that potentially affect others, given that our cognitive resources have limited capacity [1], to decide and act efficiently.
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