Does increased stress make it harder to be generous and compassionate toward others? Here's what the research says, writes DrMarwaAzab
A study that investigated how stress affects generosity may have alarming and consequential findings. Thirty-five participants were randomly assigned to stress or control conditions . In the stress condition, participants completed the Trier Social Stress Test . They had to deliver a speech to explain why they are the ideal candidate for a job in front of cold evaluators while being videotaped. The task increased their blood pressure and cortisol levels, as would be expected.
Before engaging in this stressful task, baseline measures of participants’ mentalizing levels were collected. Mentalizing skills enable us to understand others’ inner mental states . In this study, mentalization was positively correlated with generosity. In other words, those with higher mentalization abilities tended to be more generous compared to those with lower abilities.
The participants completed a donation task while being scanned in an MRI at two different times: before the social stress task and afterward. The task entailed deciding whether or not to donate to a charity while in the MRI. The participants were given 20 euros and could keep a percentage of whatever money they decided not to donate. The altruistic decision to donate would directly cost the person in the scanner as they would end up with less money for themselves.
It turned out that stress tended to make participants more selfish. They were, on average, less generous after being exposed to social stress . Physiological measures of stress like cortisol collected from saliva were also predictive of generosity. For example, increases in cortisol were associated with less giving, and the stronger the physiological stress reactions to the stress task, the more selfish they became.
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