IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0199528.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Social preferences under chronic stress

Author

Listed:
  • Smarandita Ceccato
  • Sara E Kettner
  • Brigitte M Kudielka
  • Christiane Schwieren
  • Andreas Voss

Abstract

Even though chronic stress is a pervasive problem in contemporary societies and is known to potentially precede both adverse psychological as well as physiological conditions, its effects on decision making have not been systematically investigated. In this paper, we focus on the relation between self-reported chronic stress and self-reported as well as behaviorally shown social preferences. We measured chronic stress with the Trier Inventory for Chronic Stress. To determine social preferences, participants played a double anonymous dictator game. In order to control for the robustness of social preferences we employed a 2x2x2x2 design where we manipulated four variables: the frame (Give to Recipient vs. Take from Recipient), the decision maker’s gender (Female vs. Male), the recipient’s gender (Female vs. Male), and the nature of the reward (Real vs. Hypothetical). Results show that perceived chronic stress is not significantly related to social preferences in monetarily rewarded dictator decisions for either gender. However, women’s displayed preferences for hypothetical rewards are negatively correlated to chronic stress levels. This indicates that higher chronic stress in women is associated with lower hypothetical transfers but not with altered actual behavior as compared to non-stressed women. For men, we do not observe such effects. Our findings suggest that, while chronic stress leaves social preferences unaffected in an incentive compatible task, it might foster what could be interpreted as a decrease in self-image promotion in women. Thus, we conclude that in a thoroughly controlled behavioral task differences in reported chronic stress do not entail differences in social preferences, but relate to variation in hypothetical decisions for women.

Suggested Citation

  • Smarandita Ceccato & Sara E Kettner & Brigitte M Kudielka & Christiane Schwieren & Andreas Voss, 2018. "Social preferences under chronic stress," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(7), pages 1-16, July.
  • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0199528
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0199528
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0199528
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0199528&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0199528?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Breitkopf, Laura & Chowdhury, Shyamal K. & Priyam, Shambhavi & Schildberg-Hörisch, Hannah & Sutter, Matthias, 2020. "Do economic preferences of children predict behavior?," DICE Discussion Papers 342, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE).
    2. Haushofer, Johannes & Jain, Prachi & Musau, Abednego & Ndetei, David, 2021. "Stress may increase choice of sooner outcomes, but not temporal discounting," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 183(C), pages 377-396.
    3. Gorny, Paul M. & Groos, Eva & Strobel, Christina, 2024. "Do Personalized AI Predictions Change Subsequent Decision-Outcomes? The Impact of Human Oversight," MPRA Paper 121065, University Library of Munich, Germany.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0199528. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.