title: Social Discounting in the Elderly: Senior Citizens are Good Samaritans to Strangers.
abstract: 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.
  
  
  
  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.
  
  
  
  Our results supported that older adults were more generous toward socially distant others (i.e., less social discounting) compared to younger adults.
  
  
  
  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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore.|Neurobiology/Ageing Programme and Institute for Neurotechnology (SINAPSE), Center for Life Sciences, National University of Singapore.
authors.forename: Narun
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Pornpattananangkul
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore.
authors.forename: Avijit
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Chowdhury
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological Medicine, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore.
authors.forename: Lei
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore.|Neurobiology/Ageing Programme and Institute for Neurotechnology (SINAPSE), Center for Life Sciences, National University of Singapore.
authors.forename: Rongjun
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Yu
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D000533:Altruism; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D012929:Psychological Distance; D055815:Young Adult