Social connection has a price, and it varies from person to person

A willingness-to-pay experiment reveals how social support, personality traits, and pandemic experiences relate to the price people place on spending time with others.

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In a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports, researchers used a willingness-to-pay (WTP) paradigm to quantify the subjective value that 292 participants (260 online and 32 in-lab) placed on social compared with non-social experiences.

Researchers also examined whether individual differences in perceived support, loneliness, and social-cognitive abilities were associated with participants’ monetary decisions in both social and non-social contexts.

The study’s findings revealed that participants spent significantly more money on social than non-social experiences, indicating a modest overall preference for social options. Participants were further found to demonstrate a subjective willingness to pay about 1.2 cents more for a social option before becoming equally likely to choose either type.

Participants who perceived greater social support were more likely to choose social options and spent more on them, whereas those who endorsed higher levels of autistic traits or scored higher on the PCA-derived social dysfunction component were observed to assign less value to social options.

Background

Psychological research has long proposed that human behavior is strongly shaped by social connection, with interpersonal attachments providing emotional security. Research cited by the authors also links lower social resources and social isolation with loneliness, cardiovascular risk, depressive symptoms, substance use, and altered neural development.

Previous studies have shown that while socializing is inherently rewarding for most individuals, the motivation to seek out companionship varies widely between people and may relate to social resources and social-cognitive processing. Studies investigating autism spectrum disorder (ASD), for example, have revealed altered social-cognitive processing and lower preference or valuation of social stimuli in some samples. The authors later discuss social anhedonia as one possible interpretation of broader trait patterns, but the study did not directly measure social anhedonia or recruit a clinical ASD sample.

Previous psychological research had applied willingness-to-pay methods to socially relevant stimuli, but had not directly examined willingness to pay for everyday social versus non-social experiences or how this varies with social resources.

About the study

The present study aimed to address this persistent knowledge gap by systematically examining how socio-affective traits were associated with decision-making as participants used an earned endowment to choose between hypothetical social and non-social experiences.

The study cohort comprised 292 participants (165 females and 127 males; mean age = 25.73 years) recruited either via an online platform (Prolific.co) or through in-person lab testing. The final sample included 260 online and 32 in-person participants after 30 participants were excluded. The experimental condition consisted of participants first receiving a $6.00 endowment through a 24-trial card-guessing game. While presented as performance-based, the outcomes were predetermined so every participant finished with $6.00.

Next, they were required to complete a 50-trial willingness-to-pay (WTP) task, which required each participant to choose between fixed pairs of hypothetical options presented in randomized order, one social (e.g., dining with friends) and one non-social (e.g., reading alone), with costs ranging from $0.01 to $0.05 per option deducted from their endowment. Participants were told that any unspent funds would determine their take-home bonus, which averaged $4.56 across the cohort.

Among the self-report measures, the study used the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support (MSPSS), the Autism Quotient (AQ), and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Loneliness Scale to assess and quantify each participant’s socio-affective traits.

Study findings

The study’s analyses showed that participants chose social options significantly more often than chance, selecting them in about 52% of trials. Participants also spent more money on social activities, averaging $0.76, compared with $0.69 on non-social options.

These analyses further revealed that the estimated point of subjective equivalence (PSE) was $0.012, suggesting participants were willing to pay about 1.2 cents more for a social option before becoming equally likely to choose either type. The estimate carried considerable uncertainty, so the precise size of this premium remains unclear.

Correlational analyses revealed that perceived social support was positively associated with both the frequency of social choice and total social spending. Conversely, higher AQ scores were associated with lower social choice probability and reduced social expenditure.

PCA then identified three principal components explaining 50.3% of the variance in the self-report measures. PC1 (social dysfunction) included higher loneliness and autistic-trait scores together with lower social support, self-esteem, and affiliation, and was strongly associated with fewer social choices and lower spending.

PC3, reflecting psychological impacts of COVID-19, was positively associated with social choice. The authors cautiously interpreted this as a pattern that may support a greater valuation of social contact after pandemic-related isolation. In sensitivity analyses excluding COVID-related measures, PC1 remained associated with both WTP outcomes, while PC3's association with total social spending no longer met the study's statistical threshold.

The authors cautioned that social and non-social activities were not individualized or tightly matched, so participants could have chosen an activity for reasons unrelated to its social content. The experiences were hypothetical, choices reduced the real bonus money, and data collection during COVID-19, along with the imbalance between online and in-lab groups, may have influenced the findings.

Conclusions

The present study suggests that human social experiences have a quantifiable economic value, and that this value varies with perceived social support and broader socio-affective functioning. The authors call for future work to examine the neural circuitry underlying social and non-social valuation, use more individualized and tightly matched choices, and investigate how these value computations differ across psychopathology and everyday contexts.

Journal reference:

• Ruiz, M., Stasiak, J. E., Sokol-Hessner, P., Smith, D. V., & Fareri, D. S. (2026). Social cognitive functioning relates to willingness to pay for social experiences. Scientific Reports. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-69935-z. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-69935-z