Social Discounting in the Elderly: Senior Citizens are Good Samaritans to Strangers

Objectives: People tend to become more generous as they grow older, which may reflect an increase in their ego-transcending motives (i.e., concern more for the benefit of recipients than of the benefactors). The current study aimed to examine evidence for an enhanced ego-transcending motive among older adults. Methods: We adapted the social-discounting framework to quantify generosity toward people of different social distances, ranging from socially close others (e.g., family and close friends) to socially distant others (e.g., total strangers), in both young and older adults. We hypothesized that the normative decrease in generosity as a function of social distance (e.g., less generous towards strangers compared to close friends) will be mitigated in older adults. Results: Our results supported that older adults were more generous toward socially distant others (i.e., less social discounting) compared to younger adults. Discussion: Thus, consistent with the idea that the elderly are more oriented to ego-transcending goals, older adults are generous even when their generosity is unlikely to be reciprocated.