Abstract

Our reputation is important to us; we've experienced natural selection to care about our reputation. Recently, the neural processing of gains in reputation (positive social feedback concerning one's character) has been shown to occur in the human ventral striatum. It is still unclear, however, how individual differences in the processing of gains in reputation may lead to individual differences in real-world behavior. For example, in the real-world, one way that people currently maintain their reputation is by using social media websites, like Facebook. Furthermore, Facebook use consists of a social comparison component, where users observe others' behavior and can compare it to their own. Therefore, we hypothesized a relationship between the way the brain processes specifically self-relevant gains in reputation and one's degree of Facebook use. We recorded functional neuroimaging data while participants received gains in reputation, observed the gains in reputation of another person, or received monetary reward. We demonstrate that across participants, when responding to gains in reputation for the self, relative to observing gains for others, reward-related activity in the left nucleus accumbens predicts Facebook use. However, nucleus accumbens activity in response to monetary reward did not predict Facebook use. Finally, a control step-wise regression analysis showed that Facebook use primarily explains our results in the nucleus accumbens. Overall, our results demonstrate how individual sensitivity of the nucleus accumbens to the receipt of self-relevant social information leads to differences in real-world behavior.

Highlights

  • Reputation can be defined as a person’s overall quality of character as judged by others (Merriam-Webster, 2010)

  • To address our research question concerning the relation between the neural processing of positive social feedback and the degree of Facebook use, we looked for blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal change within the bilateral nucleus accumbens

  • Relative to observing gains for others, the processing of gains in reputation in the left nucleus accumbens predicts the intensity of Facebook use across individuals

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Summary

Introduction

Reputation can be defined as a person’s overall quality of character as judged by others (Merriam-Webster, 2010). How we process information related to our reputation has recently been the topic of neuroscientific research (for review see Izuma, 2012). This research has demonstrated that the processing of gains in reputation (positive social feedback related to one’s character) occurs in the ventral striatum (Izuma et al, 2008; Korn et al, 2012). The ventral striatum, which includes the nucleus accumbens, has been well-established in the processing of other rewards which motivate human behavior, such as money or food (for review see Haber and Knutson, 2010). No study has yet investigated how individual differences in the neural processing of self-relevant, social information may be related to differences in real-world social behavior, including behavior aimed at obtaining a good reputation

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