Abstract
Contributing to and maintaining public goods are important for a functioning society. In reality, however, we see large variations in contribution behavior. While some individuals are not cooperative, others are highly so. Still others cooperate only to the extent they believe others will. Although these distinct behavioral types clearly have a divergent social impact, the sources of heterogeneity are poorly understood. We used source‐localized resting electroencephalography in combination with a model‐free clustering approach to participants' behavior in the Public Goods Game to explain heterogeneity. Findings revealed that compared to noncooperators, both conditional cooperators and unconditional cooperators are characterized by higher baseline activation in the right temporo‐parietal junction, an area involved in social cognition. Interestingly, conditional cooperators were further characterized by higher baseline activation in the left lateral prefrontal cortex, an area involved in behavioral control. Our findings suggest that conditional cooperators' better capacities for behavioral control enable them to control their propensity to cooperate and thus to minimize the risk of exploitation by noncooperators.
Highlights
In modern human society, many of the pressing issues such as depletion of natural resources, intergroup conflicts, and security of basic social systems require numerous individuals to contribute to, or maintain, public goods
Since the resting fast-wave oscillations in the beta2 and beta3 bands likely reflect increased cortical activations (Gamma et al, 2004; Laufs et al, 2003; Oakes et al, 2004), these results indicate that both cooperative types were characterized by higher baseline activation in the right TPJ compared to noncooperators, while only conditional cooperators were characterized by higher baseline activation in the left LPFC compared to either unconditional cooperators or noncooperators
Cluster analysis identified three distinct behavioral types strongly differing in their contribution behaviors and beliefs about others' behavior in a public goods game (PGG)
Summary
Many of the pressing issues such as depletion of natural resources, intergroup conflicts, and security of basic social systems require numerous individuals to contribute to, or maintain, public goods. To measure individual differences in group-based cooperative behavior, we employed a well-established and widely used paradigm for measuring cooperation in groups, that is, the four-person public goods game (PGG). Various task-dependent studies demonstrated that lateral areas of the prefrontal cortex are involved in strategic choices in fairness norm compliance (e.g, Tusche et al, 2016), and in the Prisoner's Dilemma Game (e.g., Fermin et al, 2016; Steinbeis, Bernhardt, & Singer, 2012). This study showed that patients with lesions in the lateral prefrontal cortex are less likely to cooperate These previous studies help to understand the neural mechanism of cooperation or prosocial behavior, none of these studies used a cluster-based approach to disentangle distinct behavioral types in a PGG. Since the previous studies only allowed for tentative hypotheses, we conducted whole-brain corrected analyses to uncover the neural traits of different behavioral types in the PGG
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