Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2014
Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 98 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
98 citing papers in PubMed.
- Mindfulness training reduces slippery slope effects in moral decision-making and moral judgment.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Oxytocin facilitates valence-dependent valuation of social evaluation of the self.Communications biology · 2020Trial
- Dissociable Effects of Serotonin and Dopamine on the Valuation of Harm in Moral Decision Making.Current biology : CB · 2015Trial
- Psychological and computational evidence that merit is a constructed evaluative process.Science advances · 2026Article
- Stochastic choice drives variability in patch foraging decisions in humans and rats.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Humans are more prosocial in poor foraging environments.Nature communications · 2026Article
- When Collaboration Falters, Insensitivity to How Our Actions Affect Others Drives Inflated Self-evaluations.Computational brain & behavior · 2026Article
- Neural correlates of risky monetary decision-making impacting others.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- The influence of self-relevance under time pressure on moral decision-making.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Human neurocomputational mechanisms of guilt-driven and shame-driven altruistic behavior.eLife · 2025Article
- Avoiding Pain to Others Motivates Effortful Prosocial Behavior.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions disrupt learning to reward others.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- Hypocritical blame is associated with reduced prosocial motivation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Article
- Dual-System Collaborative Model of Prosocial Risky Behavior and Cognitive Computation: A Review.PsyCh journal · 2025Review
- A computational account of multiple motives guiding context-dependent prosocial behavior.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- The German translation of the Oxford utilitarianism scale: Validation and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the observations.PloS one · 2025Article
- Distinct neural networks of task engagement and choice response in moral, risky, and ambiguous decision-making: An ALE meta-analysis.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Less is more: information needs, information wants, and what makes causal models useful.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2023Article
- Value-based neural representations predict social decision preferences.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
38 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Concern for the suffering of others is central to moral decision making. How humans evaluate others' suffering, relative to their own suffering, is unknown. We investigated this question by inviting subjects to trade off profits for themselves against pain experienced either by themselves or an anonymous other person. Subjects made choices between different amounts of money and different numbers of painful electric shocks. We independently varied the recipient of the shocks (self vs. other) and whether the choice involved paying to decrease pain or profiting by increasing pain. We built computational models to quantify the relative values subjects ascribed to pain for themselves and others in this setting. In two studies we show that most people valued others' pain more than their own pain. This was evident in a willingness to pay more to reduce others' pain than their own and a requirement for more compensation to increase others' pain relative to their own. This "hyperaltruistic" valuation of others' pain was linked to slower responding when making decisions that affected others, consistent with an engagement of deliberative processes in moral decision making. Subclinical psychopathic traits correlated negatively with aversion to pain for both self and others, in line with reports of aversive processing deficits in psychopathy. Our results provide evidence for a circumstance in which people care more for others than themselves. Determining the precise boundaries of this surprisingly prosocial disposition has implications for understanding human moral decision making and its disturbance in antisocial behavior.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.