Abstract
Third-party altruistic decision-making has been shown to be modulated by other-regarding attention (e.g., focusing on the offender’s crime or the victim’s situation especially in judicial judgment). However, the neural mechanisms underlying this modulation remain poorly understood. In this fMRI study, participants voluntarily decided if they wanted to punish the first-party offender or help the second-party victim using their own monetary endowment in an unfair context. Particularly, before deciding they were asked to focus on the (un)fairness of the offender proposing the offer (offender-focused block, OB), the feeling of the victim receiving this offer (victim-focused block, VB), or without any specific focus (baseline block, BB). We found that compared to BB participants punished more frequently and prolonged help choices in OB, whereas they helped more frequently in VB. These findings were accompanied by an increased activation in the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) during decision making in OB and VB. Moreover, regions relevant to cognitive control (esp. IFG/AI and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex) were strongly recruited during specific choices conflicting the attention focus (e.g., choosing help in OB). Our findings revealed how other-regarding attention modulates third-party altruistic decision-making at the neural level.
Highlights
Third-party altruistic decision-making has been shown to be modulated by other-regarding attention
The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) extending to the supplementary motor area (SMA) was active during decision making in OB compared to VB (i.e., OBdec >VBdec; see Fig. 3A; see Table S3 for details of all activated regions)
In the HELP subsample (GLM2), the contrast OBhelp >BBhelp yielded a stronger activation in the bilateral temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), the bilateral IFG extending to the AI together with the dACC/SMA
Summary
Third-party altruistic decision-making has been shown to be modulated by other-regarding attention (e.g., focusing on the offender’s crime or the victim’s situation especially in judicial judgment). The neural mechanisms underlying this modulation remain poorly understood In this fMRI study, participants voluntarily decided if they wanted to punish the first-party offender or help the secondparty victim using their own monetary endowment in an unfair context. It has been shown that third-party observers helped/compensated unknown victims (i.e., second-parties) using their own monetary endowment in similar unfair situations, if both help and punishment choices were provided[7,8]. This finding suggests that people try to upkeep social norms like justice or fairness via different approaches driven by different other-regarding concerns. Third-party altruistic choices could be influenced by manipulating the attention focus on different contextual aspects
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