Short CommunicationA matter of distance—The effect of oxytocin on social discounting is empathy-dependent
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.).
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