Oxytocin salvages context-specific hyperaltruistic preference through moral framing

Abstract

An intriguing advancement in recent moral decision-making research suggests that people are more willing to sacrifice monetary gains to spare others from suffering than to spare themselves, yielding a hyperaltruistic tendency. Other studies, however, indicate an opposite egoistic bias in that subjects are less willing to harm themselves for the benefits of others than for their own benefits. These results highlight the delicate inner workings of moral decision and call for a mechanistic account of hyperaltruistic preference. We investigated the boundary conditions of hyperaltruism by presenting subjects with trade-off choices combing monetary gains and painful electric shocks, or, choices combing monetary losses and shocks. We first showed in study 1 that switching the decision context from gains to losses effectively eliminated the hyperaltruistic preference and the decision context effect was associated with the altered relationship between subjects’ instrumental harm (IH) trait attitudes and their relative pain sensitivities. In the pre-registered study 2, we tested whether oxytocin, a neuropeptide linked to parochial altruism, might salvage the context-dependent hyperaltruistic preference. We found that oxytocin increased subjects’ reported levels of framing the task as harming (vs. helping) others, which mediated the correlation between IH and relative pain sensitivities. Thus, the loss decision context and oxytocin nullified and restored the mediation effect of subjective harm framing, respectively. Our results help to elucidate the psychological processes underpinning the contextual specificity of hyperaltruism and carry implications in promoting prosocial interactions in our society.