Amormino Paige, Kagel Adam, Li Joanna L, Marsh Abigail A
Department of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA.
Department of Physics, University of California at San Diego, San Diego, CA, USA.
Commun Psychol. 2024 Dec 27;2(1):128. doi: 10.1038/s44271-024-00181-7.
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 test of third-party social discounting, which experimentally confirmed real-world altruists' impartiality, finding that they are more likely than controls to split resources evenly between close and distant others rather than favoring close others. However, we found no statistically significant association between impartial altruism and social relationship quality. Instead, we found that altruists' close others also show more impartiality than controls. This suggests value homophily (shared moral values) among altruists, which may represent a protective factor for close relationships in the context of impartial altruism.
公正利他主义通常被视为一种道德理想，但在实践中却很罕见。相反，慷慨程度通常会随着社会距离的增加而降低，这种现象被称为社会折扣。大多数人在亲密关系中更喜欢这种偏袒，并且认为公正利他主义者是较差的关系伙伴。这表明现实世界中的公正利他主义可能很少见，因为它会降低——或者被认为会降低——亲密关系的质量。为了对此进行研究，我们比较了参与非凡现实世界公正利他行为的罕见个体样本（利他性肾脏捐赠者；n = 59）及其最亲密的朋友或家庭成员（n = 59）与对照组（n = 71）及其最亲密的他人（n = 71）的慷慨模式和社会关系质量。我们设计了一项对第三方社会折扣的直接测试，通过实验证实了现实世界中利他主义者的公正性，发现他们比对照组更有可能在亲近和疏远的他人之间平均分配资源，而不是偏袒亲近的他人。然而，我们发现公正利他主义与社会关系质量之间没有统计学上的显著关联。相反，我们发现利他主义者亲近的他人也比对照组表现出更多的公正性。这表明利他主义者之间存在价值同质性（共同的道德价值观），这可能代表了在公正利他主义背景下亲密关系的一个保护因素。
