Abstract
Social responsibility links personal behavior with societal expectations and plays a key role in affecting an agent’s emotional state following a decision. However, the neural basis of responsibility attribution remains unclear. In two previous event-related brain potential (ERP) studies we found that personal responsibility modulated outcome evaluation in gambling tasks. Here we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study to identify particular brain regions that mediate responsibility attribution. In a context involving team cooperation, participants completed a task with their teammates and on each trial received feedback about team success and individual success sequentially. We found that brain activity differed between conditions involving team success vs. team failure. Further, different brain regions were associated with reinforcement of behavior by social praise vs. monetary reward. Specifically, right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ) was associated with social pride whereas dorsal striatum and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) were related to reinforcement of behaviors leading to personal gain. The present study provides evidence that the RTPJ is an important region for determining whether self-generated behaviors are deserving of praise in a social context.
Highlights
Actions are guided by a sense of personal responsibility that follows moral principles [1]
First the subjective rating scores of pride in the pride conditions were submitted to a one-factor repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVA) with three levels (HP, medium pride (MP) and low pride (LP))
Follow-up T-tests revealed higher reported pride in the MP condition (7.7± 1.5) compared to the high pride (HP) condition (6.9±1.6), t(14)=2.26, p
Summary
Actions are guided by a sense of personal responsibility that follows moral principles [1]. The neural basis of social responsibility attribution has yet to be well explored. Schlenker and colleagues defined responsibility as a psychological adhesive that connects an actor to an event in accord with behavioral prescriptions [4]. They constructed a triangle model of responsibility containing three elements: prescriptions, events and identity. Schlenker and colleagues proposed that the sense of responsibility (responsibility sense) depends on the strengths of three linkages between each two of the three elements and, prior to performing an action, affects the actor’s determination to achieve the associated goal
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