Abstract
The right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) has been proposed to play a key role in guiding human altruistic behavior, but its precise functional contribution to altruism remains unclear. We aimed to disentangle three possible functions of the rTPJ for human altruism, namely: implementing the motivation to help, signaling conflicts between moral and material values, or representing social reputation concerns. Our novel donation-decision task consisted of decisions requiring trade-offs of either positive moral values and monetary cost when donating to a good cause, or negative moral values and monetary benefits when sending money to a bad cause. Disrupting the rTPJ using transcranial magnetic stimulation did not change the general motivation to give or to react to social reputation cues, but specifically reduced the behavioral impact of moral-material conflicts. These findings reveal that signaling moral-material conflict is a core rTPJ mechanism that may contribute to a variety of human moral behaviors.
Highlights
Humans have the ability to forego material interests in the service of abstract moral values
Our results indicate that continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) over the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) increased the weight participants assigned to moral values over conflicting monetary values, irrespective of whether this conflict arises in situations with or without reputation concerns
Prosocial behavior and altruism may be governed by a general motivation to help others, by processes signaling the conflict between moral and material values, and by the motivational value of the reputation gained from helping
Summary
Humans have the ability to forego material interests in the service of abstract moral values. This is evident in different aspects of human morality and social codes, such as fairness (Knoch et al, 2006), honesty (Shalvi et al, 2012) or altruism (Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003), which are widely accepted codes of conduct. Altruistic giving is an important feature of human social behavior since it is necessary for the formation of stable groups (Fletcher and Zwick, 2004; Zisis et al, 2015); this behavior remains puzzling because giving away to others often directly opposes personal self-interest, which leads people to help others only in some circumstances determined by a precise context (DePaulo et al, 1996; Shalvi et al, 2013). While there is consensus that all these areas play important roles for altruistic decisions (Izuma, 2012; Schurz et al, 2014), it is less clear what precise functional contributions each of these areas make and whether or not each area is causally necessary for altruistic behavior to occur
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