Measuring Individual Differences in Altruism with Altruistic Learning Task

Altruism requires representing and valuing others' welfare. In the present study, we designed the Altruistic Learning task (AL task) to measure individual differences in valuing another person's welfare and examined its relationship with dispositional empathy (Experiment 1) as well as ingroup bias/parochial altruism (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, participants performed the AL task in which they made choices between a pair of stimuli with different reward probabilities (30% vs. 70%) to reduce the amount of stress for themselves or their peer participants. The task consisted of three within-subject conditions (i.e. SELF, BOTH, and OTHER conditions) where different types of outcome (i.e. points for self, for both, and for other) were associated with three different pairs of stimuli. The amount of value that each participant attached to a given outcome can be measured with the frequency of choosing the higher reward probability option (HRP option). The results showed that participants who scored higher in personal distress and empathic concern measured by IRI (Davis, 1983) were more likely to choose the HRP option in the BOTH and OTHER conditions, indicating the role of emotional empathy iin the process of valuing other-regarding outcomes. In Experiment 2, we employed the minimal group paradigm (Tajfel, 1970) and compared choices for an ingroup member with those for an outgroup member in the AL task. We employed the same experimental design as the Experiment 1, except for having INGROUP and OUTGROUP conditions, instead of previous BOTH and OTHER conditions. The choice frequency for the HRP option was higher in the SELF and INGROUP conditions than the OUTGROUP condition, indicating ingroup bias of the participants in valuing welfare of others. Our findings demonstrated that the AL task can be a useful and valid measure of individual differences in altruism.

keywords: 강화학습, 이타성, 공감, 최소집단, 내집단 편향, reinforcement learning, altruism, empathy, minimal group, ingroup bias

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Article Contents

Vol.33 No.2

Measuring Individual Differences in Altruism with Altruistic Learning Task

Abstract

Reference

Korean Journal of Psychology: General