ArticlePsychological science2021
Aging Increases Prosocial Motivation for Effort.
Article in Psychological science, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 44 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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.
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.
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Who cites it
44 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Are Older Adults More Prosocial Than Younger Adults? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.The Gerontologist · 2024Pooled it
- Mood computational mechanisms underlying increased risk behavior in adolescent suicidal patients.eLife · 2026Article
- Article
- Detecting age differences in prosociality using a newly developed picture-based measure.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- The neural basis of prosocial effort-based decision making in older adults at risk for Alzheimer's disease.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 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
- Psychosocial profiles of bystander resuscitation among Macao residents: a latent profile analysis.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Adults with more severe psychopathy in the community show increased social discounting.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
- Adult age differences in the integration of values for self and other.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Protocol for an intergenerational randomized controlled trial to enhance physical activity in older adults at risk for Alzheimer's disease.The journal of prevention of Alzheimer's disease · 2025Article
- Machine learning identifies key individual and nation-level factors predicting climate-relevant beliefs and behaviors.npj climate action · 2025Article
- Neural empathy mechanisms are shared for physical and social pain, and increase from adolescence to older adulthood.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Older adults are relatively more susceptible to impulsive social influence than young adults.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Human ventromedial prefrontal cortex is necessary for prosocial motivation.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Dopamine and acetylcholine have distinct roles in delay- and effort-based decision-making in humans.PLoS biology · 2024Article
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
Social cohesion relies on prosociality in increasingly aging populations. Helping other people requires effort, yet how willing people are to exert effort to benefit themselves and others, and whether such behaviors shift across the life span, is poorly understood. Using computational modeling, we tested the willingness of 95 younger adults (18-36 years old) and 92 older adults (55-84 years old) to put physical effort into self- and other-benefiting acts. Participants chose whether to work and exert force (30%-70% of maximum grip strength) for rewards (2-10 credits) accrued for themselves or, prosocially, for another. Younger adults were somewhat selfish, choosing to work more at higher effort levels for themselves, and exerted less force in prosocial work. Strikingly, compared with younger adults, older people were more willing to put in effort for others and exerted equal force for themselves and others. Increased prosociality in older people has important implications for human behavior and societal structure.
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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.