People who are more considerate of others show less “me first” bias in quick decisions

A study conducted in the U.K. found that people who were more socially mindful, meaning more attentive to other people’s needs and choices, showed a weaker egocentric bias when making quick decisions. Specifically, they showed a smaller tendency to identify their own belongings faster and more accurately than objects belonging to a friend. The paper was published in Consciousness and Cognition.

People tend to process information related to themselves differently from information related to other people. This tendency is known as self-bias. One common example of this is self-prioritization, in which objects associated with oneself are recognized more quickly and accurately than objects associated with someone else. Even trivial possessions can acquire this advantage, suggesting that merely linking an object to the self can influence decision-making.

Researchers increasingly view this effect not as an automatic feature of cognition, but as a flexible bias that depends on the situation and on characteristics of the individual. One proposed mechanism is an egocentric “default-to-self” tendency, in which people initially assume that an object is more likely to belong to themselves than to another person. This assumption can speed decisions about self-related objects by reducing the amount of evidence needed before responding.

One characteristic that may weaken this tendency is social mindfulness. Social mindfulness is the tendency to consider other people’s needs, wishes, and freedom of choice when making decisions. People who are more socially mindful also tend to be more cooperative, generous, empathic, and trusting in their interactions with others. Greater consideration of other people may therefore reduce the cognitive advantage normally given to self-related information and make self-prioritization less pronounced.

Study author Marius Golubickis of United Arab Emirates University and his colleagues hypothesized that greater social mindfulness would be associated with less self-bias. More specifically, they expected that more socially mindful individuals would show smaller differences in the speed and accuracy of their responses to their own objects compared with a friend’s objects, and that this would be explained by a weaker default-to-self assumption.

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Study participants were 100 adults tested in a laboratory at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, each paid £10 (about $13). Sixty-four were women, and their average age was 28. Nine participants were later excluded for not following instructions, leaving 91 for the analysis.

Participants completed two tasks: an object classification task, which measured self-bias, and an object-selection task, which measured social mindfulness. In the object classification task, the computer assigned one category of objects to the participant and the other to a named best friend. The two categories were pens and pencils, and which item went to whom was varied across participants.

After learning which objects belonged to whom, participants saw a brief picture of either a pen or a pencil and had to report, as quickly and accurately as possible, who owned it. Each participant completed 10 practice trials followed by two blocks of 100 trials.

In the object-selection task, participants were shown sets of three or four objects in which one item was unique and the others were identical. The task was presented as if it was being played with a partner, a stranger they would never meet, and the participant always chose first. Choosing one of the identical items was considered socially mindful because it preserved the partner’s ability to choose between different options, whereas taking the unique item removed that choice.

As expected, participants responded faster to objects they owned (542 milliseconds, on average) than to objects owned by their friend (557 milliseconds), and they were slightly more accurate with their own objects (94% vs. 92%). This confirmed that participants showed self-prioritization. However, the effect was smaller among participants who were more socially mindful, for both speed and accuracy, and some participants even responded faster to their friend’s objects. Social mindfulness accounted for a modest share of the differences between people, about 5% for speed and 11% for accuracy.

To explore the mechanism behind these findings, the researchers used a computational model of decision-making that separates how efficiently people process what they see from any bias they bring to a decision before the object appears. The model showed that participants tended to begin each decision already leaning toward the answer that the object belonged to them. This lean was weaker among people higher in social mindfulness, which the authors interpret as reduced egocentrism. Participants also processed their own objects slightly more efficiently than their friend’s, but this advantage was not related to social mindfulness.

“Collectively, these findings further underscore the malleability of self-prioritization and provide a computational account of how social mindfulness impacts decision-making,” study authors concluded.

The study sheds light on individual differences in decision-making. However, the study examined ownership decisions about only two kinds of trivial objects, pens and pencils, and results might differ for more important possessions. In addition, all participants were from the U.K., and the authors note that culture may shape both social mindfulness and self-bias.

The study was also correlational, so it cannot show that social mindfulness causes reduced self-bias, and the researchers did not check whether participants believed they were really choosing alongside another person. Social mindfulness was measured with a single behavioral task, which may not capture all aspects of consideration for others.

The paper, “Social mindfulness is associated with reduced self-bias: A computational approach,” was authored by Marius Golubickis, Siobhan Caughey, Esther S. Selvaraj, Parnian Jalalian, Yadvi Sharma, Jessica Highfield, Rinki Kanakraj, and C. Neil Macrae.