The Psychological Record

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40732-021-00488-5

SKETCH

A Review of Social Discounting: The Impact of Social

Distance on Altruism
Bryan A. Jones 1

Accepted: 9 August 2021

# Association for Behavior Analysis International 2021

Abstract
Altruistic choice is influenced by the relationship between the person making the choice and the recipient, and such relationships
are based on an intangible quality known as social distance. This review examines the research on social distance as a part of the
social discounting task, which employs behavioral economic methods to quantify the impact of social relationships on altruistic
choice. The review examines the origins of the social discounting task and the subsequent work in laboratory simulations and as
applied to clinical populations. The application of social discounting and social distance to the study of altruism is discussed.

Keywords Social discounting . Social distance . Altruism . Behavioral economics

Why individuals choose to help others at their own expense
represents a challenge in traditional economic models of be-
havior because social relationships cannot be measured in
tangible ways. Although economists have found ample evi-
dence for altruistic behavior in social dilemma games like the
prisoner’s dilemma and ultimatum–dictator games (see
Camerer 2003, for a review), an important variable in this
phenomenon has been left unmeasured: the relationship be-
tween the person making a decision and the recipient of the
outcome, which undoubtedly exerts an impact on the choice.
Rachlin and Raineri (1992) posited that weaker social rela-
tionships reduce the value of altruistic outcomes in the same
way that future choices are discounted as a function of the
delay in their receipt; however, they did not test this claim
empirically.
How the influence of social relationships operates was ad-
dressed when Jones and Rachlin (2006) developed the social
discounting task (SDT) in which participants choose to keep
an amount of money for themselves or share it with other
individuals whom they describe as varying in social distance
from them. Representing the psychophysical measure of con-
nectedness and the strength of a social relationship, social
distance may be the key to understanding why some people
* Bryan A. Jones
bjones70@kent.edu
1
Kent State University at Ashtabula, 3000 Lake Drive,
Ashtabula, OH 44004, USA
choose to give money to friends and family but not to mere
acquaintances or strangers. If the SDT can measure social
distance’s effect on altruistic choice, then it is a useful measure
in behavioral economics for illuminating some previously un-
studied aspects of altruism, including (1) the strength of social
relationships as social distance that can be included in other
measures in behavioral economics and (2) the overall sensi-
tivity to social distance in altruistic choices exhibited by a
social discounting rate, which may predict altruistic behavior
outside the laboratory.
Social Distance
Social distance is a psychophysical measure of how close or
distant an individual feels toward someone else. The strength
of a relationship with another person is often defined by esti-
mates of physical distance. For example, one might express
the strength of a relationship by saying “he’s a close friend” or
“she’s a distant cousin”; however, few have attempted to use
empirical measures to quantify those psychophysical esti-
mates on a consistent scale. In behavioral economics social
distance is the missing component in determining why people
might forgo a reward for themselves to offer it to someone
else, but the psychophysical value of distance has been untest-
ed. To fill the gap, Jones and Rachlin (2006) gave participants
the following instructions as the basis for measuring social
distances in their initial study on SDT:

The following experiment asks you to imagine that you
have made a list of the 100 people closest to you in the
world ranging from your dearest friend or relative at
position #1 to a mere acquaintance at #100. The person
at number one would be someone you know well and is
your closest friend or relative. The person at #100 might
be someone you recognize and encounter but perhaps
you may not even know their name. You do not have to
physically create the list—just imagine that you have
done so. Next you will be asked to make a series of
judgments based on your preferences. On each line,
you will be asked if you would prefer to receive an
amount of money for yourself versus an amount of mon-
ey for yourself and the person listed. (p. 284)
Social Distance as a Psychophysical Measure
Jones and Rachlin (2006) found systematic reductions in the
amount of money participants were willing to give up in order
to share money with another person. The greater the social
distance, the more likely participants were to keep money
for themselves instead of splitting the undiscounted amount
with another. In a series of follow-up studies Rachlin and
Jones (2008a, 2008b) found that offering participants money
to select an altruistic option was unnecessary: participants
chose to forgo money to give it to another person despite the
lack of direct reward for themselves. Participants gave up
money for themselves order to give it to those at the closest
social distances and choose to keep more money as social
distance to a potential recipient increased. These results
confirm the role of social distance as the determining factor
in the SDT yet did not provide direct evidence of social
distance as a stable psychophysical phenomenon.
In order to validate the social distance prompt as a psycho-
physical measure, Rachlin and Jones (2010) asked partici-
pants to further imagine that the people they chose for each
social rank were arranged on a field and positioned by their
rank. Participants provided an estimate of how far away each
person would be in the hypothetical physical space. Although
each one gave numerous estimates of scale, the relative dis-
tance between each rank adhered to a power function consis-
tent with other psychophysical measurements. Thus, social
distance estimates are relatively uniform and serve as a con-
ceivable way to measure real-world relationships for labora-
tory studies. Further work has shown that the ordinal scale for
social distance could be measured as a ratio scale (Safin &
Rachlin, 2020), expanding its utility in research.
A possible explanation for the effect of social distance may
be the perceived genetic overlap between individuals. In one
study, Rachlin and Jones (2008a) asked participants complet-
ing the SDT to indicate their relationship with each person at
Psychol Rec
the envisioned social distance. The description of each recip-
ient included a variety of potential relationships, which could
be split between those who were related by genetic overlap
(blood relatives) and those who were friends and family with-
out a biological connection. When the amount of money for-
gone for each social distance was split between those with
family designations versus those who were not blood rela-
tives, individuals gave more money to blood relatives at all
social distances. The results suggested that shared genes may
increase the likelihood of altruistic acts.
Further expansion of the social distance influencing deci-
sions came from the social distance measure used by Ziegler
and Tunney (2012), who explicitly listed familiar relation-
ships (e.g., parents, siblings, cousins). Results indicated that
strangers were valued less than friends and that social distance
was a factor in the decision. The same social distance task was
employed by Yamakawa et al. (2009) in a neuroimaging
study, which showed that the parietal cortex was active during
decisions related to social distance. A growing body of litera-
ture on the SDT task has provided evidence that the social
distance construct can approximate some of the effect that
the strength of the social relationship has on decision making.
Social Discounting Task
The roots of the SDT can be traced to the history of delay or
utility discounting tasks in behavioral economics (Rachlin,
2006). Delay discounting research has long been a staple of
the behavioral economics movement (Frederick et al., 2002).
One of the follow-up studies to the Jones and Rachlin’s (2006)
initial study compared SDT to delay discounting (Rachlin &
Jones, 2008b). Both delay and social discounting operate on
the same principles as decisions affected by intangible
psychophysical estimates, but evidence suggested that delay
and social distance differ in the way they predict behavior.
Rachlin and Jones (2008b) argued that social relationships
are discounted much in the same way (hyperbolic form) that
people discount delays; that is, the further away the relation-
ship is situated, the less immediate value it has. Charlton et al.
(2013) replicated this effect by comparing immediate choices
and delayed choices, confirming that social distance can be
considered similar in function to delays.
Social discounting also shares similar properties to proba-
bility discounting, a task where participants are asked to
choose between a guaranteed amount of money versus one
that occurs only as the result of a gamble. Jones and Rachlin
(2009) found that the effect of increasing reward magnitude in
SDT behaved similarly to increasing the reward magnitude in
probability discounting: it produced steeper discounting rates.
The opposite is found in delay discounting, where an in-
creased reward leads to less discounting.
Psychol Rec
Delay discounting has been tied to impulsive behaviors like
drug addiction (Bickel & Marsch, 2001). Because social
discounting may be a related process, social discounting rates
should have some utility in predicting altruistic behavior, two
areas of altruism research are ripe for this comparison—
economic games and real-world donations—and SDT re-
search has provided evidence for both.
Economic games in which individuals are asked to choose
between selfish and altruistic choices have been a staple in
behavioral economics research. Prevalent in this research are
three categories of games: public goods games, prisoner’s
dilemmas, and ultimatum–dictator games.
In a public goods game participants are asked to contribute
to a common pool of money, which will later be divided
equally among a group. A typical scenario involves a request
to contribute funds for a party. Individual participants can
choose how much (or little) to contribute and can do so
anonymously. All group members gain when contributions
to the group are larger; thus individual generosity is a key
component to the contribution. When Jones and Rachlin
(2009) asked participants to indicate how much of a hypothet-
ical $100 they would donate to a party fund, they found that
the amount offered in the public goods game was related di-
rectly to social discounting rates: individuals who offered to
donate more money had shallower social discounting rates.
In a follow-up study social distance was applied to the
ultimatum–dictator game, in which participants were asked
to split an amount of money with another person. Rachlin
and Jones (2010) told participants to imagine they had won
money on a game show and tasked them with splitting the
winnings. The dictator game establishes the baseline for gen-
erosity: the person making the offer chooses to offer $0 to the
other player(s) without any direct repercussion. The dictator
condition is compared to the ultimatum condition, in which
the recipient of the offer can decide whether or not to accept
the amount. Failure to accept the offer results in both parties
receiving nothing. Although these games are typically con-
ducted either anonymously or with individuals who are
brought into a laboratory together, Rachlin and Jones (2010)
added a social distance component to the task: the recipient of
offers in both conditions were varied in the social distance
prompt. The greater the social distance, the less the partici-
pants offered for the split in both games, a result replicated by
Bechler et al. (2015). In addition, Kim et al. (2013) used the
social distance task from Jones and Rachlin (2006) to establish
the distance between the participant and hypothetical person
offering a proposal to split money in an ultimatum game.
Participants considered lower offers from those at close social
distances as more unfair than offers from those at further so-
cial distances.
The prisoner’s dilemma is similar to the public goods game
and ultimatum–dictator games (Camerer 2003). In the pris-
oner’s dilemma participants are asked to make choices
between cooperating and defecting with a partner (or multiple
partners). Successful cooperation is typically rewarded with
higher payouts with the caveat that defecting on a cooperating
partner pays out a higher reward for the defector but typically
results in the other player defecting in future rounds. Mutual
cooperation maintains higher levels of payouts than mutual
defection. Similar to the other measures, the social distance
between players is left to the recruitment of participants (and
was thus an unmeasured confounding variable). Comparing
SDT to altruistic choices in a prisoner’s dilemma game con-
firmed that social discounting predicts cooperation (Locey
et al., 2011). Evidence from public goods, ultimatums, and
prisoner’s dilemma games suggests that social discounting
rates are a proxy for altruistic acts.
One criticism of the application of social discounting rates be-
yond the laboratory is that these behavioral economic games are
driven by hypothetical values. To address this, Locey et al. (2011)
provided participants with the social distance component of the
SDT task prior to a laboratory experiment. They asked participants
to bring with them the names and addresses of several individuals
whose social distances they had ranked and were told that one of
their hypothetical choices would be selected at random and paid
with real money. If a selfish choice was made, participants would
receive the money immediately, but altruistic choices would result
in the recipient’s receiving the money via mail. Choices in the real-
money SDT did not differ in the hypothetical SDT values,
confirming that people make hypothetical choices that resemble
real-world choices. This finding is similar to results from delay
discounting research that show hypothetical rewards are treated
like real rewards (Dixon et al., 2013; Johnson & Bickel, 2002).
Neural Correlates of the SDT
Further validation of the SDT derived from the exploration of
the neural correlates of altruistic choice. The underlying brain
structures that account for altruistic choices may lead to a
greater understanding of how to improve altruistic choices in
the future. Yamakawa et al. (2009) first included social dis-
tance as a variable describing the relationships while partici-
pants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging
(FMRI). Their findings suggested that social and physical
distance are related and share similar activation in the
parietal lobe. Strombach et al. (2015) found that making al-
truistic choices in a social discounting task while undergoing a
FMRI activates neurons in the temporoparietal junction.
Soutschek et al. (2016) found that activity in the posterior
temporal–parietal junction was associated with altruistic
choices when they asked participants to complete discounting
tasks while undergoing a FMRI. Additional work is needed to
discover the underlying mechanisms that determine altruistic
choices for socially distant individuals.

Cross-Cultural Comparisons of Social
Discounting
Culture may have an impact on altruistic behavior. One hy-
pothesis is that more collectivist cultures will produce higher
levels of generosity and thus lower social discounting rates
than more individualistic cultures. For example, Strombach
et al. (2014) found that Chinese participants, who come from
a more collectivist culture, discounted less than German par-
ticipants (a more individualistic culture). Likewise, Japanese
participants discounted less than Americans (Ito et al., 2011).
Further work is needed to tease apart the distinction of why
some groups may discount less than other, and whether this
means that altruistic behavior can be promoted through cul-
tural lessons.
Clinical Applications of Social Discounting
Although many of the initial SDT findings were limited to
laboratory studies, some of the most promising evidence for
social discounting as a predictor of altruistic behavior came
from clinical settings. Whether social discounting represents a
static or malleable trait is unknown (may be true; see Odum &
Baumann, 2010, for a similar discussion about delay
discounting research), but Bradstreet et al. (2012) suggested
that social discounting rates can change over time. When com-
paring discounting rates for pregnant women who smoked
throughout the study to those who quit smoking successfully
during their pregnancies, they found that rates of social
discounting dropped for those who successfully abstained
from smoking, suggesting that the motivation for quitting
may be related to altruism toward the fetus. Results also indi-
cated that the reduced rate of social discounting for successful
quitters was similar to those who did not smoke at all. This
also suggests that individuals with chemical dependencies
have shortened social horizons, similar to the restrictions in
temporal horizons (Yi et al., 2012).
Comparing social discounting rates from the SDT has
shown differences among clinical populations. Examples in-
clude the following: (1) children with high levels of external-
izing behavior were steeper social discounters (Sharp et al.,
2012) than children without behavioral problems; and (2) ad-
olescents and adults diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder
(ASD) discounted both delays and social choices more steeply
than controls (Warnell et al., 2019). However, this nascent
work contradicts previous findings that participants on the
spectrum do not have steeper rates of discounting than con-
trols (Demurie et al., 2012). Future work may help understand
the behavioral mechanisms that differ in those with ASD, and
how those behaviors relate to other developmental disorders.
Although the SDT has been used to assess altruistic behav-
ior post hoc, at least one study (Vekaria et al., 2017) showed
Psychol Rec
that social discounting is less steep among those who have
engaged in magnanimously altruistic behaviors like donating
kidneys to a stranger. Whether these individuals would have
exhibited less steep social discounting rates prior to their de-
cision to behave altruistically remains unknown, but this ini-
tial study has provided a basis for future research on the topic.
Conclusion
Both the social discounting task and the psychophysical social
distance measure have been replicated and have shown some
utility in predicting altruistic behaviors, both in and outside
the laboratory. Future researchers should, therefore, attempt to
examine whether social discounting rates are affected by al-
truistic decision making or can predict future altruistic behav-
ior. The results of more than a decade of research have indi-
cated that measuring the relative psychological space between
one individual and another can be a basis for understanding
the elusive nature of the influence of social distance on choice
in behavioral economics. As in social discounting tasks, SDTs
allow for a previously unanswered question: Why do some
individuals choose to act outside their own self-interest when
confronted with a social dilemma whereas others choose to act
in selfish ways even if it affects their own friends and families?
The SDT also provides a tool for estimating how social rela-
tionships are formed, maintained, improved, or lost.
Declarations
Ethical Approval and Consent to Participate Not applicable.
Availability of Supporting Data Not applicable.
Competing Interests None.
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