Social value at a distance: Higher identification with all of humanity is associated with reduced social discounting

Abstract

How much we value the welfare of others has critical implications for the collective good. Yet, it is unclear what leads people to make more or less equal decisions about the welfare of those from whom they are socially distant. The current research sought to explore the psychological mechanisms that might underlie welfare judgments across social distance. Here, a social discounting paradigm was used to measure the tendency for the value of a reward to be discounted as the social distance of its recipient increased. Across two cohorts (one discovery, one replication), we found that a more expansive identity with all of humanity was associated with reduced social discounting. Additionally, we investigated the specificity of this association by examining whether this relationship extended to delay discounting, the tendency for the value of a reward to be discounted as the temporal distance to its receipt increases. Our findings suggest that the observed association with identity was unique to social discounting, thus underscoring a distinction in value-based decision-making processes across distances in time and across social networks. As data were collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also considered how stress associated with this global threat might influence welfare judgements across social distances. We found that, even after controlling for COVID-19 related stress, correlations between identity and social discounting held. Together these findings elucidate the psychological processes that are associated with a more equal distribution of generosity.

Impartial Intergenerational Beneficence: The Psychology of Feeling Equal Concern for All Future Generations

“…These findings, along with earlier research on the cognitive science of imagination (Gilead et al, 2020;Tuen et al, 2023), suggest that psychological distance considerations, whether temporal or social in nature, may invoke similar cognitive processes.…”

Moral Future-Thinking: Does the Moral Circle Stand the Test of Time?

“…Social discounting, the degree to which individuals devalue rewards for others across social distance, positively correlates with delay discounting, the degree to which individuals devalue rewards across temporal distance (Jones, 2022;Tuen et al, 2023). This convergence is further supported by an overlapping neural basis involved in perspective-taking across various dimensions of psychological distance (Hill et al, 2017).…”

What We Owe the Present: The Perceived Morality of Longtermism and Helping Distant Future People

“…Expanding upon this work, we demonstrate similar effects for longtermism across temporal distance. Future research can investigate whether such similarities arise from the shared cognitive architecture invoked when mentally traversing spans of psychological distance, whether social or temporal in nature (e.g., Tuen et al, 2023). While we haven't fully explored the mechanisms of intergenerational moral judgments, forthcoming research could integrate earlier insights from moral psychology, particularly focusing on values like fairness and loyalty as potential factors (e.g., Dungan et al, 2019;Graham et al, 2011).…”

“…Regardless of whether this is ethically true, we agree both forms of suffering may be psychologically similar. Considering the literature above alongside construal level theory and related research showing similarity in how people process temporal and social distance (Tamir & Mitchell, 2011;Trope & Liberman, 2010;Tuen et al, 2023), a hypothesis which follows is that decisions to prioritize the future over the present, even if for the sake of the greater good, will be judged more negatively than the inverse, akin to moral judgments of effective altruism (Law et al, 2022).…”