Fig. 4: Similarity and convergence to ‘friend’ or ‘money’ and choices between social relationships and monetary gains in the dilemma task.

A Overall, participants who generated concepts similar to ‘friend’ in the FAST tended to prioritize social relationships over monetary gains. Error bars indicate 95% confidence intervals. B We compared the MSEs from LOOCV with those from our initial regression analyses using the full dataset to evaluate the predictive performance of our regression models. None of the MSEs from the full dataset significantly deviated from individual MSEs or exceeded one standard deviation from the average MSEs from LOOCV, lending support to the validity of our models. The model number, in sequence, represents the results when cosine similarity (average and seed word “money”) to, WMD (average, seed word “friend,” and seed word “money”) from, and convergence (seed word “money”) to ‘friend’ are entered as predictors. For a more comprehensive analysis, we included the results with uncorrected p < 0.05, as well as those shown in Fig. 4A. The detailed results are presented in Supplementary Table S10. C Participants with higher SWB prioritized social relationships over monetary gains, and this relationship was mediated by the overall greater similarity of the generated concepts to ‘friend’ (See Supplementary Fig. S1A for the results of the indirect effect of WMD from ‘friend’). Standardized path coefficients are shown, with standard errors in parentheses. *p < 0.05. For different seed words, adjusted p values were applied. Panels A–C are based on the US/UK sample (n = 192).