Social discounting and anti-/pro-sociality: A meta-analysis and (short-form) replication.

Early research in behavioral sciences emphasized situational and contextual factors as key drivers of prosocial behavior, with individual differences historically receiving less attention. However, more recent work underscores that prosocial tendencies exhibit meaningful and stable variation across individuals, highlighting the value of robust, non-self-report measures that capture these differences across diverse domains. The Social Discounting Task (SDT), which assesses how generosity declines as social distance increases, is one candidate measure. Our preregistered meta-regression revealed an inverse relationship between social discounting and multiple prosocial outcomes (N = 14, r = -0.231, p < 0.001), and supported the hyperbolic nature of the relationship between generosity and social distance (N = 44, logk = -2.37, p < 0.0001). We found no evidence for differences in real-world vs. hypothetical rewards on social discounting, nor evidence for differences in social discounting from country-level individualism-collectivism. Increased country-level relational mobility was a significant predictor of reduced social discounting (Blogk effects = -1.12, N = 36, p = .0451). In conceptual replications of 14 prosocial/antisocial outcomes predicted by the SDT, all prosocial effects and two of four antisocial effects replicated, further supporting the SDT’s robustness as a predictor of stable individual differences in prosociality.