Abstract: Social discounting refers to the phenomenon that altruistic behavior gradually decreases with the increase of social distance between individuals in the process of interpersonal communication. Different from using the altruistic scale and trust game paradigm to measure altruistic behavior in general, social discounting task, which means the individual is willing to discard the amount of money in exchange for others to obtain a fixed amount of behavior as a standard of altruism, quantifies social distance for the first time. The construal level theory provides a theoretical basis for the connotation of social discounting and gives a reasonable interpretation for its internal mechanism. Future research can explain social discounting from the view of selfconstrual, and try to apply social support-related indicators substitute of money, in order to avoid the conclusion that the initiation of the concept of money leads to selfishness.

Key words: social discount, self-control, social distance, altruistic behavior