Individuals face numerous daily decisions and an increasing array of options to choose from. They are often required to generate choices rather than selecting from a fixed set. This study looked at...Show moreIndividuals face numerous daily decisions and an increasing array of options to choose from. They are often required to generate choices rather than selecting from a fixed set. This study looked at choice satisfaction when people generate options themselves, both for themselves and for others. Besides, it examined why individuals generate different numbers of options for themselves versus others. The study tested that fewer options would be generated for oneself either due to prosocial effort (H1) or dissimilarity (H2), and that choice satisfaction would be higher for own choices due to fewer options (H3). An experiment in which participants generated options for themselves, others, or a similar other across various scenarios supported H2, showing that dissimilarity drives the generation of fewer options for oneself and more for others. However, choice satisfaction was not greater for own choices. This offers new insights into self-generated choice overload, challenging traditional choice overload.Show less
Research master thesis | Psychology (research) (MSc)
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Adolescent’s prosocial behaviour is likely related to their social context and relationships. This social context drastically changes during adolescence, with peers becoming more important relative...Show moreAdolescent’s prosocial behaviour is likely related to their social context and relationships. This social context drastically changes during adolescence, with peers becoming more important relative to parents. This pilot study therefore investigated the relative contribution and interaction of adolescents’ quality of parental and peer attachment in predicting their prosocial behaviour towards unknown peers. Forty-two adolescents aged 9-12 completed the brief Inventory of Parent and Peer Attachment and an adapted version of the Prosocial Effort Task. In this task, participants choose whether to earn rewards for themselves and others by exerting physical effort. Computational modelling was used to quantify the rate at which rewards lose subjective value to adolescents when effort increases, both when earning rewards for others and for themselves. The difference in this effort discounting rate for others and for themselves was used as measure of prosocial behaviour, as well as the difference between the number of times participants chose to exert high effort for others and for themselves. We show that adolescents are generally less willing to exert effort for others than for themselves, and that their willingness to exert effort for a reward is more strongly affected by the effort needed to obtain it when someone else will receive this reward. These findings support the cost-benefit framework of prosocial motivation. Linear models fitted using nonparametric bootstrapping show nonsignificant trends in the expected directions, namely higher quality parental and peer attachment being related to more prosocial behaviour and peer attachment generally being a stronger predictor than parental attachment. We found some evidence that girls show significantly more prosocial behaviour than boys. Future research should further investigate these potential effects using larger samples with a broader age range across adolescence, to also study developmental effects.Show less
