Social Effort Discounting Reveals Domain-General and Social-Specific Motivation Components

Abstract

Background: Social motivation is crucial for healthy interpersonal connections and is impaired in a subset of the general population and across many psychiatric disorders. However, compared with nonsocial (e.g., monetary) motivation, social motivation has been understudied in quantitative behavioral work, especially regarding willingness to exert social effort. We developed a novel social effort discounting task, paired with a monetary task to examine motivational specificity. We expected that social task performance would relate to general motivation and also show selective relationships with self-reported avoidance tendencies and with sociality.

Methods: An analyzed sample of 397 participants performed the social and nonsocial effort discounting task online, along with self-report measures of various aspects of motivation and psychiatric symptomatology.

Results: Social and nonsocial task motivation correlated strongly (ρ = 0.71, p < .001). Both social and nonsocial task motivation related similarly to self-reported general motivation (social, β = 0.16; nonsocial, β = 0.13) and to self-reported approach motivation (social, β = 0.14; nonsocial, β = 0.11), with this common effect captured by a significant main effect across social and nonsocial conditions. Significant condition interaction effects supported a selective relationship of social task motivation with self-reported sociality and also with avoidance motivation.

Conclusions: Our novel social effort discounting task revealed both domain-general and social-specific components of motivation. In combination with other measures, this approach can facilitate further investigation of common and dissociable neurobehavioral mechanisms to better characterize normative and pathological variation and develop personalized interventions targeting specific contributors to social impairment.

Keywords: Avoidance motivation; Behavioral inhibition; Crowdsourcing; Decision making; Effort discounting; Social motivation.

Figure 1:

Examples of effort, reward, and choice screens in the social (top) and nonsocial (bottom) effort discounting tasks.

Figure 2:

Column bars reflect standardized regression coefficients (equivalent to correlation strengths) for the MAP-SR global motivation measure (A) and the social function measure (B) for descriptive comparison of the following models: Social selective (social task motivation controlling for shared variance with nonsocial task motivation in multiple regression), Social (social task motivation in simple regression not controlling shared variance), Average (simple regression with average task motivation across social and nonsocial conditions), Nonsocial (nonsocial task motivation in simple regression not controlling shared variance), Nonsocial selective (nonsocial task motivation controlling for shared variance with social task motivation in multiple regression). Error bars indicate the regression standard error parameter.

Figure 3:

Column bars reflect standardized regression coefficients for the BAS Drive approach motivation measure (A) and BIS inhibition motivation measure (B) for descriptive comparison of the following models: Social selective (social task motivation controlling for shared variance with nonsocial task motivation in multiple regression), Social (social task motivation in simple regression not controlling shared variance), Average (simple regression with average task motivation across social and nonsocial conditions), Nonsocial (nonsocial task motivation in simple regression not controlling shared variance), Nonsocial selective (nonsocial task motivation controlling for shared variance with social task motivation in multiple regression). Error bars indicate the regression standard error parameter.

Figure 4:

Graphical representation of the significant interaction (p=0.03) between approach motivation (BAS Drive) and inhibition motivation (BIS) on social task motivation. Panels A and B show the same interaction from different perspectives. In A, BAS Drive is the continuous measure on the x-axis and its relationship with social task motivation is separated by those high in BIS (blue line), and those low in BIS (red line). In B, BIS is the continuous measure on the x-axis and its relationship with social task motivation is separated by those high in BAS Drive (blue line), and those low in BAS Drive (red line).