Abstract
Giving is often characterized by the conflicting decision to give up something of value to benefit others. Recent evidence indicated that giving is highly context-dependent. To unravel the neural correlates of social context, in this study, young adults (n = 32) performed a novel giving fMRI paradigm, in which they divided coins between self and known (friends) or unknown (unfamiliar) others. A second manipulation included presence of others; giving decisions were made with an audience or anonymously. Results showed that participants gave more coins to a friend than to an unfamiliar other and generally gave more in the presence of an audience. On a neural level, medial prefrontal cortex and the right insula were most active for relatively generous decisions. These findings possibly reflect that aversion of norm deviation or fairness concerns drive differences in the frequency of giving. Next, activation in separate subregions of the TPJ-IPL (i.e., a region that comprises the TPJ and inferior parietal lobule) was found for target and audience contexts. Overall, our findings suggest that donation size and social contextual information are processed in separable brain regions and that TPJ-IPL plays an important role in balancing self- and other-oriented motives related to the social context.
Highlights
Giving is often characterized by the conflicting decision to give up something of value to benefit others
We showed that neural activity in the anterior TPJ-IPL is higher when considering giving to friends (Braams et al, 2014; Crone & Fuligni, 2019; Schreuders et al, 2018), which fits well with recent findings that costly giving to a friend compared to a disliked other engaged bilateral TPJ-IPL and putamen in young adults (Schreuders et al, 2018)
We demonstrated that donation size and social contexts pertaining to the target of giving and being observed by an audience are processed in separable brain regions
Summary
Giving is often characterized by the conflicting decision to give up something of value to benefit others. The goal of this study was to investigate whether neural regions associated with giving are differentially activated due to variation in 1) familiarity of the target of giving and 2) whether an audience was present or not These two social contextual task manipulations have previously been found to be most powerful in influencing giving behavior. The familiarity of the target and presence of an audience increase the likelihood to give because young adults perceive giving in these contexts to be less costly or in conflict with their own social norms, as it prevents loss of resources to out-group members and helps them to meet reputational goals (Cutler & Campbell-Meiklejohn, 2019; Telzer et al, 2015; Van de Groep et al, 2019). To unravel the overlapping and unique roles of neural regions involved in these two forms of social context sensitivity, it is of importance to manipulate both within the same design; as this allows for testing the additive and interaction effects of familiarity and audience manipulations
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