Gender-Specific Effects of Cognitive Load on Social Discounting

Abstract

We live busy, social lives, and meeting the challenges of our complex environments puts strain on our cognitive systems. However, cognitive resources are limited. It is unclear how cognitive load affects social decision making. Previous findings on the effects of cognitive load on other-regarding preferences have been ambiguous, allowing no coherent opinion whether cognitive load increases, decreases or does not affect prosocial considerations. Here, we suggest that social distance between individuals modulates whether generosity towards a recipient increases or decreases under cognitive load conditions. Participants played a financial social discounting task with several recipients at variable social distance levels. In this task, they could choose between generous alternatives, yielding medium financial rewards for the participant and recipient at variable social distances, or between a selfish alternative, yielding larger rewards for the participant alone. We show that the social discount function of male participants was significantly flattened under high cognitive load conditions, suggesting they distinguished less between socially close and socially distant recipients. Unexpectedly, the cognitive-load effect on social discounting was gender-specific: while social discounting was strongly dependent on cognitive load in men, women were nearly unaffected by cognitive load manipulations. We suggest that cognitive load leads men, but not women to simplify the decision problem by neglecting the social distance information. We consider our study a good starting point for further experiments exploring the role of gender in prosocial choice.

Trainee perception of cognitive load during observed faculty staff teaching of procedural skills

“…With respect to our participants, only 25% were female because the fellow classes from which we recruited had fewer females than average in our programme and nationally only about one-third of gastroenterology fellows are women. 43 Although limited evidence in the social sciences suggests a potential impact of gender on cognitive load, 44 previous work did not find gender to have an impact on cognitive load in the endoscopy setting. 12 However, the present study provides no information as to how gender may affect the teaching strategies used by attending physicians.…”

Incentivising the Social Discounting Task: A Laboratory Experiment

“…Other countries where studies have been conducted include China (Boyer, Lienard & Xu, 2012;He & Jiang, 2013;Strombach et al, 2014), Germany (Böckler, Tusche & Singer, 2016;Strombach et al, 2014Strombach et al, /2015Strombach et al, /2016, Japan (Ito et al, 2011), Kenya (Boyer et al, 2012) and Poland (Osínski, 2010;Osínski, Karbowski & Ostaszewski, 2015).…”

“…The exceptions are Locey, Jones and Rachlin (2011) who execute one randomly chosen task for payment and the recent work by Strombach et al (2014Strombach et al ( /2015Strombach et al ( /2016) who also choose one task at random, though they pay only 10% of the face value of amounts used in the actual experiment. 4 Economists are largely sceptical of the value of experiments in which no real payments are made (Hertwig and Ortmann, 2001) and even within the SDT literature, Yi, Carter and Landes (2012), recognise the limitation of the widespread use of hypothetical incentives in social discounting experiments.…”

“…4 To be clear, subjects are informed that this will be the case. 5 Strombach et al (2014Strombach et al ( , 2015Strombach et al ( , 2016 only have a real payment treatment. Locey et al (2011) have both hypothetical and real payment treatments, but depart from the typical practice of SDT tasks by asking subjects to pre-nominate recipients.…”

“…In Psychology, social discounting experiments in some cases focuses on the behavioural moderators explaining observed differences in altruism, including intolerance of uncertainty and empathy (Olson et al, 2016) and cognitive load (Strombach et al, 2016), which impact social discounting differently in men and women.…”