Discount of social support in stressful situations

Abstract

Here it was determined how people discounted the effect of social support as a function of the social distance between them and the supporter. A group of students was asked to estimate their magnitude of discomfort in a situation in which they had to cope with hypothetical stressful life-events while they received social support from another person which could occupy a certain position in a hypothetical list of people with whom one saves some degree of social distance. The magnitude of the stress-mitigating effect of social support decreased as a hyperbolic function of social distance between receivers and the hypothetical supporters. This function was steeper for the most stressful scenario, detention in jail, than for other life-events. It is concluded that there is a social discounting of stress-mitigating effect of social support, similar to that shown with the allocation of resources between people.