Social Decision Making in Younger and Older Adults

Many of our decisions have consequences for those around us, yet psychological research on decision making has traditionally overlooked social dimensions of choice. Aging is associated with a shift in goal motivation from personal to social aspects, heightening altruistic tendencies in older adults. I aimed to investigate social decision making processes in younger and older adults, with a particular focus on risky choice in affect-rich and affect-poor formats. Across 4 experiments, healthy younger and older adults were tested in a laboratory or online and received either hypothetical or real rewards. The within-subjects manipulation for all experiments was the social context (self vs. charity). I predicted that age differences in risk taking would be greater for others given a shift towards emotionally meaningful goals in older age. In Experiment 1, participants completed an affect-poor gambling task. Relative to older adults, younger adults took greater risks for themselves than for the charity, whereas older adults showed no difference. Experiments 2-4 used the Columbia Card Task (CCT), a risky-choice task with affect-rich and affect-poor formats. In Experiment 2, older adults took greater risks for the charity than for themselves, whereas younger adults showed the opposite pattern for affect-poor decisions and no effect for affect-rich decisions. Experiment 3 served as a conceptual replication of Experiment 2 in an online format compatible with the rest of the experiments. Results largely replicated those of Experiment 2, with older adults taking greater risks for the charity than themselves, and younger adults demonstrating the opposite pattern. In Experiment 4, outcomes for self and charity were placed in a tradeoff relationship. Both age groups demonstrated greater risk taking in the self-gain/charity-loss context relative to the charity-gain/self-loss context, but this effect was larger in younger than in older adults. Taken together, older adults demonstrated a less consistent pattern for self-other decisions than younger adults and were less impacted by emotional arousal. Overall, I provide novel evidence of age differences in social decision making, with potential implications for real-world decisions in areas such as health, finance, and philanthropy.