Charitability, Compulsion, & the Cost of Control

Abstract

Human decision-makers have a well-established preference for free choice. We used a hierarchical gambling task to assess whether this preference extends to environments in which decision outcomes benefit others, specifically charitable organizations. In neurotypical individuals (n=100), we found a reduction in the preference for free choice across self- and charity-benefiting environments when freely chosen options yielded divergent sensory outcome distributions, but not when the outcome distributions of available options were identical - i.e., only when free choice afforded instrumental control. In individuals with obsessive-compulsive traits (n=108) this pattern was reversed, suggesting an unchanged preference for control in charity-benefiting environments. Computational cognitive modeling confirmed a selective reduction in the subjective utility of instrumental control, dissociable from that of free choice, outcome divergence, and monetary reward maximization, in neurotypical individuals gambling for charities. We interpret these results as reflecting cost-benefit analyses weighing the deployment of cognitive effort against the value of control.