ArticlePNAS nexus2023
Neural responses underlying extraordinary altruists' generosity for socially distant others.
Article in PNAS nexus, 2023. 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 7 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
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Lonelier people feel less empathic despite intact neural empathy responses after meditation training.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Trial
- The neurophysiological correlates of altruism: A scoping review of fMRI, EEG, and autonomic studies.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Adults with more severe psychopathy in the community show increased social discounting.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Independent Impacts of Maltreatment and Amygdala Volume on Worsening Callous-Unemotional Traits in High-Risk Youths.Research on child and adolescent psychopathology · 2025Article
- Steeper social discounting after human basolateral amygdala damage.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Close relationship partners of impartial altruists do not report diminished relationship quality and are similarly altruistic.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Unselfish traits and social decision-making patterns characterize six populations of real-world extraordinary altruists.Nature communications · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Most people are much less generous toward strangers than close others, a bias termed social discounting. But people who engage in extraordinary real-world altruism, like altruistic kidney donors, show dramatically reduced social discounting. Why they do so is unclear. Some prior research suggests reduced social discounting requires effortfully overcoming selfishness via recruitment of the temporoparietal junction. Alternatively, reduced social discounting may reflect genuinely valuing strangers' welfare more due to how the subjective value of their outcomes is encoded in regions such as rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and amygdala. We tested both hypotheses in this pre-registered study. We also tested the hypothesis that a loving-kindness meditation (LKM) training intervention would cause typical adults' neural and behavioral patterns to resemble altruists. Altruists and matched controls (
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