Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • Letter
  • Published:

Prosocial apathy for helping others when effort is required

Abstract

Prosocial acts—those that are costly to ourselves but benefit others—are a central component of human coexistence13. While the financial and moral costs of prosocial behaviours are well understood46, everyday prosocial acts do not typically come at such costs. Instead, they require effort. Here, using computational modelling of an effort-based task, we show that people are prosocially apathetic. They are less willing to choose to initiate highly effortful acts that benefit others compared with those benefitting themselves. Moreover, even when choosing to initiate effortful prosocial acts, people exhibit superficiality, exerting less force into the actions that benefit others than those that benefit themselves. These findings were replicated, and were present whether the other person was anonymous or not, and when choices were made to earn rewards or avoid losses. Importantly, the least prosocially motivated people had higher subclinical levels of psychopathy and social apathy. Thus, although people sometimes ‘help out’, they are less willing to benefit others and are sometimes ‘superficially prosocial’, which may characterize everyday prosociality and its disruption in social disorders.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Figure 1: Prosocial motivation measure for self versus other.
Figure 2: Prosocial apathy when deciding to exert effort to reward others.
Figure 3: A model comparison robustly shows across two studies that a model with separate discount parameters for self and other best explains behaviour.
Figure 4: Reduced force when exerting effort to help others.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Fehr, E. & Camerer, C. F. Social neuroeconomics: the neural circuitry of social preferences. Trends Cogn. Sci. 11, 419–427 (2007).

    Google Scholar 

  2. Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. The nature of human altruism. Nature 425, 785–791 (2003).

    Google Scholar 

  3. Fehr, E. & Rockenbach, B. Human altruism: economic, neural, and evolutionary perspectives. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 14, 784–790 (2004).

    Google Scholar 

  4. Crockett, M. J., Kurth-Nelson, Z., Siegel, J. Z., Dayan, P. & Dolan, R. J. Harm to others outweighs harm to self in moral decision making. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 111, 17320–17325 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  5. Crockett, M. J. et al. Dissociable effects of serotonin and dopamine on the valuation of harm in moral decision making. Curr. Biol. 25, 1852–1859 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  6. Engel, C. Dictator games: a meta study. Exp. Econ. 14, 583–610 (2011).

    Google Scholar 

  7. Lockwood, P. L., Apps, M. A. J., Valton, V., Viding, E. & Roiser, J. P. Neurocomputational mechanisms of prosocial learning and links to empathy. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113, 9763–9768 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Anderson, N. E. & Kiehl, K. A. The psychopath magnetized: insights from brain imaging. Trends Cogn. Sci. 16, 52–60 (2012).

    Google Scholar 

  9. Batson, C. D. in The Handbook of Social Psychology 4th edn (McGraw-Hill, 1998).

    Google Scholar 

  10. Blair, J ., Mitchell, D & Blair, K. in The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain (Blackwell Publishing, 2005).

    Google Scholar 

  11. Blair, R. J. R., Jones, L., Clark, F. & Smith, M. Is the psychopath ‘morally insane’? Personal. Individ. Differ. 19, 741–752 (1995).

    Google Scholar 

  12. Krajbich, I., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Denburg, N. L. & Camerer, C. F. Economic games quantify diminished sense of guilt in patients with damage to the prefrontal cortex. J. Neurosci. 29, 2188–2192 (2009).

    Google Scholar 

  13. Lockwood, P. L., Seara-Cardoso, A. & Viding, E. Emotion regulation moderates the association between empathy and prosocial behavior. PLoS ONE 9, e96555 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  14. Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. Social norms and human cooperation. Trends Cogn. Sci. 8, 185–190 (2004).

    Google Scholar 

  15. Apps, M. A. J., Grima, L. L., Manohar, S. & Husain, M. The role of cognitive effort in subjective reward devaluation and risky decision-making. Sci. Rep. 5, 16880 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  16. Apps, M. A. & Ramnani, N. The anterior cingulate gyrus signals the net value of others’ rewards. J. Neurosci. 34, 6190–6200 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  17. Bonnelle, V. et al. Characterization of reward and effort mechanisms in apathy. J. Physiol. Paris 109, 16–26 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  18. Kurniawan, I. T. et al. Choosing to make an effort: the role of striatum in signaling physical effort of a chosen action. J. Neurophysiol. 104, 313–321 (2010).

    Google Scholar 

  19. Vassena, E. et al. Overlapping neural systems represent cognitive effort and reward anticipation. PLoS ONE 9, e91008 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  20. Inzlicht, M., Bartholow, B. D. & Hirsh, J. B. Emotional foundations of cognitive control. Trends Cogn. Sci. 19, 126–132 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  21. Bonnelle, V., Manohar, S., Behrens, T. & Husain, M. Individual differences in premotor brain systems underlie behavioral apathy. Cereb. Cortex 26, 807–819 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  22. Hartmann, M. N., Hager, O. M., Tobler, P. N. & Kaiser, S. Parabolic discounting of monetary rewards by physical effort. Behav. Processes 100, 192–196 (2013).

    Google Scholar 

  23. Klein-Flügge, M. C., Kennerley, S. W., Friston, K. & Bestmann, S. Neural signatures of value comparison in human cingulate cortex during decisions requiring an effort–reward trade-off. J. Neurosci. 36, 10002–10015 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  24. Klein-Flügge, M. C., Kennerley, S. W., Saraiva, A. C., Penny, W. D. & Bestmann, S. Behavioral modeling of human choices reveals dissociable effects of physical effort and temporal delay on reward devaluation. PLoS Comput. Biol. 11, e1004116 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  25. Skvortsova, V., Palminteri, S. & Pessiglione, M. Learning to minimize efforts versus maximizing rewards: computational principles and neural correlates. J. Neurosci. 34, 15621 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  26. Westbrook, A. & Braver, T. S. Cognitive effort: a neuroeconomic approach. Cogn. Affect. Behav. Neurosci. 15, 395–415 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  27. Westbrook, A. & Braver, T. S. Dopamine does double duty in motivating cognitive effort. Neuron 89, 695–710 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  28. Ang, Y.-S., Manohar, S. & Apps, M. A. J. Commentary: noradrenaline and dopamine neurons in the reward/effort trade-off: a direct electrophysiological comparison in behaving monkeys. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 9, 310 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  29. Varazzani, C., San-Galli, A., Gilardeau, S. & Bouret, S. Noradrenaline and dopamine neurons in the reward/effort trade-off: a direct electrophysiological comparison in behaving monkeys. J. Neurosci. 35, 7866–7877 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  30. Manohar, S. G. et al. Reward pays the cost of noise reduction in motor and cognitive control. Curr. Biol. 25, 1707–1716 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  31. Winking, J. & Mizer, N. Natural-field dictator game shows no altruistic giving. Evol. Hum. Behav. 34, 288–293 (2013).

    Google Scholar 

  32. Camerer, C. Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction (Princeton Univ. Press, 2003).

    Google Scholar 

  33. Marin, R. S. Apathy: concept, syndrome, neural mechanisms, and treatment. Semin. Clin. Neuropsychiatry 1, 304–314 (1996).

    Google Scholar 

  34. Ang, Y.-S., Lockwood, P., Apps, M. A. J., Muhammed, K. & Husain, M. Distinct subtypes of apathy revealed by the apathy motivation index. PLoS ONE 12, e0169938 (2017).

    Google Scholar 

  35. Brodaty, H., Altendorf, A., Withall, A. & Sachdev, P. Do people become more apathetic as they grow older? A longitudinal study in healthy individuals. Int. Psychogeriatr. 22, 426–436 (2010).

    Google Scholar 

  36. Clarke, D. E., Ko, J. Y., Lyketsos, C., Rebok, G. W. & Eaton, W. W. Apathy and cognitive and functional decline in community-dwelling older adults: results from the Baltimore ECA longitudinal study. Int. Psychogeriatr. 22, 819–829 (2010).

    Google Scholar 

  37. Vansteenkiste, M., Lens, W., De Witte, S., De Witte, H. & Deci, E. L. The ‘why’ and ‘why not’ of job search behaviour: their relation to searching, unemployment experience, and well-being. Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 34, 345–363 (2004).

    Google Scholar 

  38. Vansteenkiste, V., Lens, W., Witte, H. & Feather, N. Understanding unemployed people’s job search behaviour, unemployment experience and well-being: a comparison of expectancy-value theory and self-determination theory. Br. J. Soc. Psychol. 44, 269–287 (2005).

    Google Scholar 

  39. Insel, T . et al. Research domain criteria (RDoC): toward a new classification framework for research on mental disorders. Am. J. Psychiatry 167, 748–751 (2010).

    Google Scholar 

  40. Hartmann, M. N. et al. Apathy but not diminished expression in schizophrenia is associated with discounting of monetary rewards by physical effort. Schizophr. Bull. 41, 503–512 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  41. FeldmanHall, O., Dalgleish, T., Evans, D. & Mobbs, D. Empathic concern drives costly altruism. NeuroImage 105, 347–356 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  42. Zaki, J. & Ochsner, K. N. The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise. Nat. Neurosci. 15, 675–680 (2012).

    Google Scholar 

  43. White, B. A. Who cares when nobody is watching? Psychopathic traits and empathy in prosocial behaviors. Personal. Individ. Differ. 56, 116–121 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  44. Foulkes, L., McCrory, E. J., Neumann, C. S. & Viding, E. Inverted social reward: associations between psychopathic traits and self-report and experimental measures of social reward. PLoS ONE 9, e106000 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  45. Salamone, J. D., Yohn, S. E., López-Cruz, L., San Miguel, N. & Correa, M. Activational and effort-related aspects of motivation: neural mechanisms and implications for psychopathology. Brain J. Neurol. 139, 1325–1347 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  46. Kennerley, S. W., Behrens, T. E. J. & Wallis, J. D. Double dissociation of value computations in orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate neurons. Nat. Neurosci. 14, 1581–1589 (2011).

    Google Scholar 

  47. Kurzban, R., DeScioli, P. & O’Brien, E. Audience effects on moralistic punishment. Evol. Hum. Behav. 28, 75–84 (2007).

    Google Scholar 

  48. Piazza, J. & Bering, J. M. Concerns about reputation via gossip promote generous allocations in an economic game. Evol. Hum. Behav. 29, 172–178 (2008).

    Google Scholar 

  49. Haley, K. J. & Fessler, D. M. T. Nobody’s watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game. Evol. Hum. Behav. 26, 245–256 (2005).

    Google Scholar 

  50. Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. Advances in prospect theory: cumulative representation of uncertainty. J. Risk Uncertain. 5, 297–323 (1992).

    Google Scholar 

  51. Tversky, A. & Kahneman, D. Loss aversion in riskless choice: a reference-dependent model. Q. J. Econ. 106, 1039–1061 (1991).

    Google Scholar 

  52. Chong, T. T.-J. et al. Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying valuation of effort costs. PLoS Biol. 15, e1002598 (2017).

    Google Scholar 

  53. Blair, R. J. R. The neurobiology of psychopathic traits in youths. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 14, 786–799 (2013).

    Google Scholar 

  54. Cleckley, H. M. The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues about the So-Called Psychopathic Personality (Mosby, 1964).

  55. Hare, R. D. & Neumann, C. N. in Handbook of Psychopathy (ed. Patrick, C. J. ) 58–88 (Guilford Press, 2006).

    Google Scholar 

  56. Hare, R. D. The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised: PLC-R (Multi-Health Systems, 1999).

    Google Scholar 

  57. Paulhus, D ., Neumann, C. & Hare, R. Manual for the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (Multi-Health Systems, 2009).

    Google Scholar 

  58. Lockwood, P. L., Bird, G., Bridge, M. & Viding, E. Dissecting empathy: high levels of psychopathic and autistic traits are characterized by difficulties in different social information processing domains. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7, 760 (2013).

    Google Scholar 

  59. Seara-Cardoso, A., Neumann, C., Roiser, J., Mccrory, E. & Viding, E. Investigating associations between empathy, morality and psychopathic personality traits in the general population. Personal. Individ. Differ. 52, 67–71 (2012).

    Google Scholar 

  60. Porter, S. & Woodworth, M. in Handbook of Psychopathy (ed Patrick, C. J. ) 481–494 (Guilford Press, 2006).

    Google Scholar 

  61. Blair, R. J. Psychopathic traits from an RDoC perspective. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 30, 79–84 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  62. Decety, J., Bartal, I. B.-A., Uzefovsky, F. & Knafo-Noam, A. Empathy as a driver of prosocial behaviour: highly conserved neurobehavioural mechanisms across species. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 371, 20150077 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  63. Ruff, C. C. & Fehr, E. The neurobiology of rewards and values in social decision making. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 15, 549–562 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  64. Lee, D. & Seo, H. Neural basis of strategic decision making. Trends Neurosci. 39, 40–48 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  65. Sui, J. & Humphreys, G. W. The integrative self: how self-reference integrates perception and memory. Trends Cogn. Sci. 19, 719–728 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  66. Floresco, S. B. Noradrenaline and dopamine: sharing the workload. Trends Neurosci. 38, 465–467 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  67. Andreoni, J. & Miller, J. Giving according to GARP: an experimental test of the consistency of preferences for altruism. Econometrica 70, 737–753 (2002).

    Google Scholar 

  68. Braams, B. R. et al. Reward-related neural responses are dependent on the beneficiary. Soc. Cogn. Affect. Neurosci. 9, 1030–1037 (2014).

    Google Scholar 

  69. Lockwood, P. L. The anatomy of empathy: vicarious experience and disorders of social cognition. Behav. Brain Res. 311, 255–266 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  70. Mobbs, D. et al. A key role for similarity in vicarious reward. Science 324, 900 (2009).

    Google Scholar 

  71. Morelli, S. A., Sacchet, M. D. & Zaki, J. Common and distinct neural correlates of personal and vicarious reward: a quantitative meta-analysis. NeuroImage 112, 244–253 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  72. Apps, M. A. J., Rushworth, M. F. S. & Chang, S. W. C. The anterior cingulate gyrus and social cognition: tracking the motivation of others. Neuron 90, 692–707 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  73. Lamm, C. & Majdandžić, J. The role of shared neural activations, mirror neurons, and morality in empathy—a critical comment. Neurosci. Res. 90, 15–24 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  74. Chang, S. W. C., Gariépy, J.-F. & Platt, M. L. Neuronal reference frames for social decisions in primate frontal cortex. Nat. Neurosci. 16, 243–250 (2013).

    Google Scholar 

  75. Lockwood, P. L., Apps, M. A. J., Roiser, J. P. & Viding, E. Encoding of vicarious reward prediction in anterior cingulate cortex and relationship with trait empathy. J. Neurosci. 35, 13720–13727 (2015).

    Google Scholar 

  76. Balsters, J. H. et al. Disrupted prediction errors index social deficits in autism spectrum disorder. Brain 140, 235–246 (2016).

    Google Scholar 

  77. Le Bouc, R. & Pessiglione, M. Imaging social motivation: distinct brain mechanisms drive effort production during collaboration versus competition. J. Neurosci. 33, 15894–15902 (2013).

    Google Scholar 

  78. Green, L. & Myerson, J. A discounting framework for choice with delayed and probabilistic rewards. Psychol. Bull. 130, 769–792 (2004).

    Google Scholar 

  79. Kahneman, D. & Tversky, A. Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47, 263–292 (1979).

    Google Scholar 

  80. Benjamini, Y. & Hochberg, Y. Controlling the false discovery rate: a practical and powerful approach to multiple testing. J. R. Stat. Soc. Ser. B Methodol. 57, 289–300 (1995).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank C. Neumann for his help and advice with regard to the self-report psychopathy scale. We also thank all members of the Cognitive Neurology Research Group for their assistance as experimental confederates. This work was supported by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Anniversary Future Leader Fellowship (BB/M013596/1) to M.A.J.A. and a Wellcome Trust Principal Fellowship and the National Institute for Health Research Oxford Biomedical Centre to M.Husain. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

P.L.L., M.A.J.A. and M.Husain designed the study, P.L.L., M.Hamonet, S.H.Z., A.R, F.U.S. and M.A.J.A. collected the data, P.L.L. and M.A.J.A. analysed the data, and P.L.L., M.A.J.A. and M.Husain wrote the paper.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Patricia L. Lockwood.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figures 1 and 2, Supplementary Table 1, Supplementary Notes, Supplementary Methods, Supplementary References.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lockwood, P., Hamonet, M., Zhang, S. et al. Prosocial apathy for helping others when effort is required. Nat Hum Behav 1, 0131 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0131

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0131

This article is cited by

Search

Quick links

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing