Altruism in a Time of Crisis: Dissociable Social Valuation and Perception during COVID-19 in the United States

Human prosocial behaviors are constantly shaped by the push-and-pull between societal need for cooperation and one’s natural tendency to self-prioritize. Nevertheless, it remains elusive how our valuation and perceptual systems might contribute to altruistic acts under the influence of a real-world crisis. Here, using computational modeling and a game-theoretic approach, we investigated how the coronavirus pandemic perturbed altruistic choices in the United States between April and May 2020. Overall, people made more altruistic choices as the pandemic became worse, an effect primarily driven by increased preference for social welfare. Paradoxically, participants also processed self-relevant information (i.e., “self-prioritization”) more efficiently at the perceptual level, as the pandemic became worse. These effects were not observed one year later (May-June, 2021) when the variability of the pandemic diminished. Furthermore, individuals’ prosocial choices and preferences did not correlate with their self-prioritization efficiency. Collectively, these results revealed a more nuanced view of human altruism — that as a dynamic and context-dependent construct, altruism can co-exist with increased attention to the self.