Social Effort Discounting Reveals Domain-General and Social-Specific Motivation Components.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Social motivation is crucial for healthy interpersonal connections and is impaired in a subset of the general population and across many psychiatric disorders. However, compared with nonsocial (e.g., monetary) motivation, social motivation has been understudied in quantitative behavioral work, especially regarding willingness to exert social effort. We developed a novel social effort discounting task, paired with a monetary task to examine motivational specificity. We expected that social task performance would relate to general motivation and also show selective relationships with self-reported avoidance tendencies and with sociality.

Methods

An analyzed sample of 397 participants performed the social and nonsocial effort discounting task online, along with self-

SUBMITTER: Savage CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11711010 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature