Charitability, Compulsion, & the Cost of Control

Human decision-makers have a well-established preference for controllable environments. We combined a hierarchical gambling task with cross-sectional administration of psychometric surveys and computational cognitive modeling, to assess whether this preference extends to contexts in which decision outcomes benefit others, specifically charitable organizations. In neurotypical individuals (n=100), there was a dramatic reduction in the preference for free choice across self- and charity-benefiting gambling contexts when freely chosen options yielded divergent outcome distributions - i.e., when free choice afforded control over decision outcomes. This selective modulation is consistent with a cost-benefit analysis, trading cognitive effort and controllability gains against the utilities of earning money for oneself vs. for a charity. When the same task was administered to individuals with self-reported obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD; n=108) the preference for control over decision outcomes was preserved across self- and charity-benefiting contexts, consistent with a responsibility-OCD subtype and with an excessive subjective utility of control more generally.