To produce or not to produce? Contrasting the effect of substance abuse in social decision-making situations

Abstract

Substance use disorders (SUD) have been related to high criminal justice costs, expensive healthcare, social impairment, and decision-making deficits. In non-social decision-making tasks, people with SUD tend to take more risks and choose small immediate rewards than controls. However, few studies have explored how people with SUD behave in social decision-making situations where the resources and profits depend directly on participants' real-time interaction, i.e., social foraging situations. To fulfill this gap, we developed a real-time interaction task to (a) compare the proportion of producers (individuals who tend to search for food sources) and scroungers (individuals who tend to steal or join previously discovered food sources) among participants with SUD and controls with respect to the optimal behavior predicted by the Rate Maximization Model, and (b) explore the relationship between social foraging strategies, prosocial behavior, and impulsivity. Here participants with SUD (n = 20) and a non-user control group (n = 20) were exposed to the Guaymas Foraging task (GFT), the Social Discounting task (SD), and the Delay Discounting task (DD). We found that participants in the control group tended to produce more and obtain higher profits in contrast to substance abuser groups. Additionally, SD and DD rates were higher for scroungers than producers regardless of the group. Our results suggest that producers tend to be more altruistic and less impulsive than scroungers. Knowing more about social strategies and producers' characteristics could help develop substance abuse prevention programs.