Elsevier

Psychoneuroendocrinology

Volume 78, April 2017, Pages 229-232
Psychoneuroendocrinology

Short Communication
A matter of distance—The effect of oxytocin on social discounting is empathy-dependent

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2017.01.031Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Trait empathy modulates the effect of oxytocin on social discounting.

  • For subjects who received oxytocin there is a positive correlation between individual trait empathy and their generous behavior towards close others.

  • There is no such correlation between individual trait empathy and their generous behavior towards close others for subjects receiving a placebo.

Abstract

Generosity is an important behavior enriching human society and can be observed across cultures. However, generosity has been shown to be modulated as a function of social distance, also referred to as social discounting. Oxytocin and empathy are other factors that have been shown to play an important role in generous behavior. However, how exactly oxytocin and empathy impact social discounting is yet unknown. Here, we administered oxytocin or placebo in a double-blind design, and measured social discounting behavior. Additionally, individual differences in empathy were assessed. Our results show that the effect of oxytocin on generous behavior is modulated by trait empathy; only for those subjects who received oxytocin there was a positive correlation between individual trait empathy and their generous behavior towards close others.

Introduction

Generous behavior is a universal phenomenon and fundamental cornerstone of all human societies (Strang and Park, 2016). Importantly, people are not equally generous to everyone alike. Generosity declines as a function of social closeness between individuals (Jones and Rachlin, 2006, Strombach et al., 2015), i.e., humans are most generous to close others (e.g., parents or partner), less generous to others in their social environment whom they do not feel that close to (e.g., colleagues), and even less to others they rarely see or have never seen before. In a variety of studies generosity was further found to be modulated by oxytocin (OXT) and empathy (Batson et al., 2015, De Dreu, 2012a). While empathy was shown to have a general positive impact on generous behavior (Batson et al., 2015), OXT has been shown to have differential effects depending on the receiver; it increases generosity towards in-group members and decreases it towards out-group members (De Dreu, 2012a). A recent study suggests that OXT induces a prosocial bias, which is sensitive to contextual framing and social cues (Marsh et al., 2015). Interestingly, OXT and empathy were also shown to interact; individual differences in empathy have been associated with endogenous and exogenous OXT levels (Barraza and Zak, 2009, Bartz et al., 2010), and an OXT receptor gene polymorphism is associated with differences in trait empathy (Rodrigues et al., 2009). Therefore, the question arises how OXT and trait empathy modulate social discounting.

Here, we investigate how OXT compared to placebo (PLC) impacts social discounting and the role of trait empathy. We hypothesize that OXT will increase generous behavior towards close social distances and that this effect will be modulated by trait empathy.

Section snippets

Subjects

We invited 132 healthy male subjects (mean age 24.4 ± 3.2 SD). Subjects were asked to maintain their regular sleep and waking times and to abstain from caffeine and alcohol intake on the day of the test session. Before receiving either OXT or PLC, subjects underwent an initial screening session. The screening entailed the exclusion of current or past physical or psychiatric illness (Appendix A in Supplementary material). All subjects gave written informed consent after being instructed about the

Results

We tested whether OXT has differential effects on generous behavior towards close others depending on trait empathy levels. The OXT and PLC groups did not differ in empathy levels (t(128) = 1.10, p = 0.27, two-sided). Regression results indicate that trait empathy has a positive influence on the V-parameter in the OXT group (b = 0.0736, p = 0.017). Post-hoc correlation analyses for OXT and PLC group separately show that only in the OXT group empathy correlates with the V-parameter (r = 0.282, p = 0.024,

Discussion

Our data provide evidence for a social-distance–dependent effect of OXT on generosity. We confirm our hypothesis by showing that the OXT-effect on social discounting is modulated by empathy. There is a significant correlation between trait empathy and V-parameters in the OXT group, while there is no such correlation in the PLC group. Since the V-parameter describes generosity for close others, our results suggest that OXT selectively increases generosity towards people who are socially close,

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Grants INST 392/125-1 and PA 2682/1-1 (to S.Q.P.).

References (16)

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