Close relationship partners of impartial altruists do not report diminished relationship quality and are similarly altruistic.

ABSTRACT: Impartial altruism is often considered a moral ideal but is rare in practice. Instead, generosity typically decreases as social distance increases, a phenomenon termed social discounting. Most people prefer this partiality in their close relationships and view impartial altruists as poorer relationship partners. This suggests real-world impartial altruism may be rare because it reduces-or is perceived to reduce-the quality of close relationships. To investigate this, we compared patterns of generosity and social relationship quality in a rare sample of individuals who had engaged in extraordinary real-world impartial altruism (altruistic kidney donors; n = 59) and their closest friend or family member (n = 59) to controls (n = 71) and their closest others (n = 71). We designed a direct tes

SUBMITTER: Amormino P 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11680964 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature