ArticleJournal of the experimental analysis of behavior2020
Social discounting of pain.
Article in Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- A behavioral measure for spite.Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior · 2026Article
- Delaying rewards reduces egoism bias during prosocial acts.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Avoiding Pain to Others Motivates Effortful Prosocial Behavior.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- The role of chronic pain and pain anxiety in delay discounting of pain and monetary losses.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Neural responses underlying extraordinary altruists' generosity for socially distant others.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Placebo Analgesia Reduces Costly Prosocial Helping to Lower Another Person's Pain.Psychological science · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 6 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Impatience can be formalized as a delay discount rate, describing how the subjective value of reward decreases as it is delayed. By analogy, selfishness can be formalized as a social discount rate, representing how the subjective value of rewarding another person decreases with increasing social distance. Delay and social discount rates for reward are correlated across individuals. However no previous work has examined whether this relationship also holds for aversive outcomes. Neither has previous work described a functional form for social discounting of pain in humans. This is a pertinent question, since preferences over aversive outcomes formally diverge from those for reward. We addressed this issue in an experiment in which healthy adult participants (N = 67) chose the timing and intensity of hypothetical pain for themselves and others. In keeping with previous studies, participants showed a strong preference for immediate over delayed pain. Participants showed greater concern for pain in close others than for their own pain, though this hyperaltruism was steeply discounted with increasing social distance. Impatience for pain and social discounting of pain were weakly correlated across individuals. Our results extend a link between impatience and selfishness to the aversive domain.
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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.