Abstract
Altruism (a costly action that benefits others) and reciprocity (the repayment of acts in kind) differ in that the former expresses preferences about the outcome of a social interaction, whereas the latter requires, in addition, ascribing intentions to others. Interestingly, an individual’s behavior and neurophysiological activity under outcome- versus intention-based interactions has not been compared directly using different endowments in the same subject and during the same session. Here, we used a mixed version of the Dictator and the Investment games, together with electroencephalography, to uncover a subject’s behavior and brain activity when challenged with endowments of different sizes in contexts that call for an altruistic (outcome-based) versus a reciprocal (intention-based) response. We found that subjects displayed positive or negative reciprocity (reciprocal responses greater or smaller than that for altruism, respectively) depending on the amount of trust they received. Furthermore, a subject’s late frontal negativity differed between conditions, predicting responses to trust in intentions-based trials. Finally, brain regions related with mentalizing and cognitive control were the cortical sources of this activity. Thus, our work disentangles the behavioral components present in the repayment of trust, and sheds light on the neural activity underlying the integration of outcomes and perceived intentions in human economic interactions.
Highlights
Due to their pervasiveness and functional importance in economic and social life, relations of trust have become an important research topic in the social sciences during the last decades, from sociology (Coleman, 2000; Cook and Santana, 2020) to economics (Dasgupta, 1988) and political sciences (Putnam et al, 1994; Putnam, 2000) to psychology (Dunning and Fetchenhauer, 2011)
The use of game theoretical experimental paradigms, which reproduce the features of situations involving trust, have produced a new wave of empirical research that aids in our understanding of the determinants of both trusting behavior and trustworthy behavior
The Dictator/Investment” game (DIG) (Dictator-Investments Game) The DIG, which we introduce here, combines the classical Investment game (IG) (Berg et al, 1995) and DG (Forsythe et al, 1994) setups, based on the experiments made by Cox (2004)
Summary
Due to their pervasiveness and functional importance in economic and social life, relations of trust have become an important research topic in the social sciences during the last decades, from sociology (Coleman, 2000; Cook and Santana, 2020) to economics (Dasgupta, 1988) and political sciences (Putnam et al, 1994; Putnam, 2000) to psychology (Dunning and Fetchenhauer, 2011). The cognitive control system, which is crucial for the inhibition of selfishness, and for strategic and normative decision-making, may be involved since the anterior cingulate (ACC; Delgado et al, 2005; van den Bos et al, 2009; Shenhav et al, 2013) and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (DLPFC; Baumgartner et al, 2011; Chang et al, 2011; Yamagishi et al, 2016) show increased activity when trustees repay trust with an amount that is smaller or greater than what they think the trustor expects to be repaid, respectively (Chang et al, 2011) Both the mentalizing and the cognitive control networks are involved under outcome-based conditions: The activity of the right TPJ correlates with how subjects value the outcomes of others (Hutcherson et al, 2015), whereas the connectivity between the ACC and the anterior insula predicts empathy-driven (outcomes-based) versus reciprocity-driven (intentions-based) altruism (Hein et al, 2016). Our work disentangles the different behavioral components underlying the repayment of trust, and implicates brain networks involved in mentalizing and cognitive control in the process of integrating outcomes and perceived intentions when humans engage in economic interactions
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