Social Status Alters the Synchrony of Attribute Integration in Altruistic Decisions

Social status, which represents the hierarchical dominance structure in societies, forms the backdrop against which most social decisions are made. Effective social decision-making demands the flexible integration of multifaceted information, including the relative weights and timings of different attributes. However, there is limited understanding of the potential impact of attribute timing on social preferences and, crucially, whether attribute weights and timings are susceptible to the influence of social status. Here, through a two-stage social decision task, we manipulated subjects’ social status before they engaged in altruistic decisions. By interrogating behavioral data through the lens of the time-varying drift diffusion process, we found that the behavioral patterns are better explained by a model that considers both attribute timing and weight. Interestingly, varying social statuses only modulate attribute timings in the decision process, leaving attribute weights unaffected. Furthermore, we demonstrated that individuals with more prosocial tendencies exhibited higher sensitivities of attribute timing in response to the changes of social status and these results were replicated in a separate and larger cohort of participants. Our results underscore the intricate interplay between social status and social attribute integration and introduce a new dimension to the computational mechanisms that underlie social decision-making.