Abstract
Altruistic punishment of social norm violations plays a crucial role in maintaining widespread cooperation in human societies, and punitive behavior has been suggested to be related to the activity level of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). This study used unilateral and bilateral transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to investigate how modulating the activity of the DLPFC affects cooperation and punishment in a 3-player prisoner’s dilemma. We found that none of the unilateral stimulations changed the participants’ cooperation behaviors, while left anodal/right cathodal stimulation increased the participants’ cooperation. For punitive behavior, we found that all unilateral stimulations (i.e., right anodal, right cathodal, left anodal, left cathodal) and bilateral stimulations (i.e., right anodal/left cathodal, left anodal/right cathodal) significantly decreased the punishment imposed by the cooperators toward the defectors. In addition, right anodal stimulation significantly decreased the participant’s third-party punishment (TPP) imposed by the cooperators toward the defectors. The other three unilateral stimulations also significantly decreased the participant’s TPP imposed by the cooperators toward the defectors, but only when the punishment was revealed to the punished person. Our findings indicate that the mechanisms of selfishness and negative emotions suggested by previous studies probably interact with different stimulations: for anodal stimulations, the mechanism of negative emotions may overwhelm the mechanism of selfishness, while for cathodal stimulations, the mechanism of selfishness may be more dominant than the mechanism of negative emotions.
Highlights
Altruistic punishment of social norm violations plays a crucial role in maintaining widespread cooperation in human societies, even though imposing punishment has a cost to the punishers (Gächter and Fehr, 1999; Fehr and Gachter, 2000; Fehr and Gächter, 2002; Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004)
We investigated the effect of four unilateral and two bilateral tDCS modes on punishment behavior, exploring how the effect of changing the hemispherical balance of the activity levels of the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) differs from the combinational effect of separately changing the activity levels of the right and left DLPFC
Our results showed that modulating the activity in the DLPFC has notably different effects on the punishment behavior toward norm defection compared to that in the ultimatum game, which implies that we should be very careful when extending the conclusions about one kind of punishment to another
Summary
Altruistic punishment of social norm violations plays a crucial role in maintaining widespread cooperation in human societies, even though imposing punishment has a cost to the punishers (Gächter and Fehr, 1999; Fehr and Gachter, 2000; Fehr and Gächter, 2002; Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004). One way that DLPFC mediates the decision-making of altruistic punishment is by affecting people’s self-control toward selfishness (Knoch et al, 2006, 2007). In the context of altruistic punishment, this means that people will be more willing to punish norm violators at their own expense if they have a higher level of activation in the DLPFC. Buckholtz et al (2015) found that inhibiting the activity of the DLPFC decreases altruistic punishment in the context of crimes This relationship between the activity in the DLPFC and altruistic punishment is suggested by a neuroscientific study that measured the participants’ resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) activity (Knoch et al, 2010) before they imposed punishments. A positive relationship was revealed between the resting-state alpha activity of the right DLPFC and the likelihood of an altruistic punishment
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