Avoiding pain to others motivates effortful prosocial behavior reducing prosocial apathy

Protecting others from harm is critical for societal well-being but is often effortful. How individuals weigh the costs of exerting effort against the benefits of avoiding harm to others is currently unknown. To fill this knowledge gap, we investigated how individuals (N = 50) decide to exert physical effort to reduce the number of painful shocks delivered to themselves and to another person. Results showed that individuals are similarly motivated to incur effort costs to reduce their pain and the pain of another person. Specifically, we found no credible evidence that participants’ willingness to put in effort and the actual force they exerted to reduce pain differed when helping the other person versus helping themselves. Further, using computational modeling we showed little credible evidence of a difference in discounting of pain reduction by effort between self- and other-related choices. These results contrast with prior research indicating that individuals are less motivated to exert effort to gain (or avoid losing) monetary rewards for others than for themselves and demonstrate that protecting others from harm shifts individuals’ effortful behavior from prosocially apathetic to prosocially motivated. Our findings shed light on the motivational processes underlying interpersonal harm avoidance and effortful prosocial behavior and highlight the importance of the type of benefit at stake for motivating prosociality.