Abstract
Humans have an exceptional ability to cooperate relative to many other species. We review the neural mechanisms supporting human cooperation, focusing on the prefrontal cortex. One key feature of human social life is the prevalence of cooperative norms that guide social behavior and prescribe punishment for noncompliance. Taking a comparative approach, we consider shared and unique aspects of cooperative behaviors in humans relative to nonhuman primates, as well as divergences in brain structure that might support uniquely human aspects of cooperation. We highlight a medial prefrontal network common to nonhuman primates and humans supporting a foundational process in cooperative decision-making: valuing outcomes for oneself and others. This medial prefrontal network interacts with lateral prefrontal areas that are thought to represent cooperative norms and modulate value representations to guide behavior appropriate to the local social context. Finally, we propose that more recently evolved anterior regions of prefrontal cortex play a role in arbitrating between cooperative norms across social contexts, and suggest how future research might fruitfully examine the neural basis of norm arbitration.
Highlights
As we suggested in In line with its domain-general support for rule-guided behavior, Section 1, the ability to represent cooperative norms and use lateral PFC (lPFC) is reliably engaged in neuroimaging studies where human those norms to guide one’s own and others’ behavior may be participants decide whether to comply with cooperative norms
The scale and scope of human cooperation has dramatically outpaced its counterparts in nonhuman primate species, manifesting as complex systems of moral codes that guide normative behaviors even in the absence of punishment or repeated interactions
We provided a selective review of the neural basis of human cooperation, taking a comparative approach to identify the brain systems and social behaviors that are thought to be unique to humans
Summary
Humans have an exceptional ability to cooperate—we are willing to incur personal costs to benefit others, including strangers, and people who we will never meet again [1–7] (see Glossary). Rostral ACC gyrus neurons in humans encode others’ common currency schema’ for social decision-making, whereby rewarding outcomes [136] This suggests the rostral ACC and social cognitive information (represented in mentalizing areas) dmPFC may be necessary for learning which actions result in modulates the activity of a domain-general value-representation. In tional ability to comply with and enforce cooperative norms may the section, we’ll examine how the subjective value of be realized by some aspects of the lPFC function that diverged cooperative decisions depends not just on relative and joint between humans and nonhuman primates through evolutionary valuation of social outcomes, and on shared beliefs about elaboration.
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