ArticleNature human behaviour2017
Prosocial apathy for helping others when effort is required.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 92 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
92 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- The relationship between apathy and impulsivity in large population samples.Scientific reports · 2021Trial
- Neural and computational mechanisms of effort under the pressure of a deadline.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Mental cost of simple(st) physical exertion.Cognition · 2026Article
- Article
- The social dimension of apathy: evidence for a distinct domain from 11,243 individuals across health and neurocognitive disorders.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Computational signatures of exertion and rest underlie moment-to-moment dynamics of subjective perceptions of effort and fatigue.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Exerting effort for non-instrumental information under risk.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Self-allocation bias in performance-based cooperative decisions is driven by self-interest rather than distorted performance encoding.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Dopamine Boosts Motivation for Prosocial Effort in Parkinson's Disease.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Humans are more prosocial in poor foraging environments.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Delaying rewards reduces egoism bias during prosocial acts.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Deciding for others diminishes model-based decision-making but depends on individual prosociality.NPJ science of learning · 2026Article
- The association between psychopathic traits and religiosity/spirituality among incarcerated adults.Personality and individual differences · 2025Article
- Continuous dynamics of cooperation and competition in social decision-making.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Effort and time costs influence motivational asymmetries in self-benefitting vs pro-environmental decisions.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Psychological interventions that decrease psychological distance or challenge system justification increase motivation to exert effort to mitigate climate change.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Avoiding Pain to Others Motivates Effortful Prosocial Behavior.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Hypocritical blame is associated with reduced prosocial motivation.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- A minute can only be spent once: Validating a behavioral paradigm to study societally relevant time allocation conflicts.Behavior research methods · 2025Article
32 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Prosocial acts - those that are costly to ourselves but benefit others - are a central component of human co-existence1-3. While the financial and moral costs of prosocial behaviours are well understood4-6, everyday prosocial acts do not typically come at such costs. Instead, they require effort. Here, using computational modelling of an effort-based task we show that people are prosocially apathetic. They are less willing to choose to initiate highly effortful acts that benefit others compared to benefitting themselves. Moreover, even when choosing to initiate effortful prosocial acts, people show superficiality, exerting less force into actions that benefit others than themselves. These findings replicated, were present when the other was anonymous or not, and when choices were made to earn rewards or avoid losses. Importantly, the least prosocially motivated people had higher subclinical levels of psychopathy and social apathy. Thus, although people sometimes 'help out', they are less motivated to benefit others and sometimes 'superficially prosocial', which may characterise everyday prosociality and its disruption in social disorders.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.