Age Differences in Social Discounting

Social discounting describes the tendency to show less generosity to the more socially distant recipient. With respect to age differences, prior studies (Pornpattananangkul et al., 2019; Lin & Zhang, 2020) found that older adults showed more generosity to distant others (i.e., lower social discounting rates) than younger adults. However, prior research relied on small samples, compared extreme age groups, and focused on Asian countries. To examine generalizability, this pre-registered study examined social discounting and charitable giving in a U.S. adult life-span sample.