Relative social status alters the synchrony of attribute integration in altruistic decisions

Social status, which represents the relative dominance structure in societies, forms the backdrop against which most social decisions are made. Effective social decision-making demands flexible integration of decision attribute weight (importance of an attribute) and attribute latency (when attributes start to affect decisions). However, current understanding of how attribute weight and latency are influenced by relative social status is limited. In three experiments, we dynamically manipulated subjects' relative social status before they engaged in an altruistic decision task and found that their altruistic behavior was better explained by a time-varying drift diffusion model, in which relative social status selectively modulated attribute latency but not attribute weights. Furthermore, prosocial subjects exhibited higher sensitivity to attribute latency in response to changes in relative social status compared with individualistic subjects. Our results introduce a new dimension to the computational mechanisms underlying the intricate interplay between relative social status and attribute integration.