Not having enough of what one needs has long been shown to have detrimental consequences for decision making. Recent work suggests that the experience of insufficient resources can create a “scarcity” mindset; increasing attention toward the scarce resource itself, but at the cost of attention for unrelated aspects. To investigate the effects of a scarcity mindset on consumer choice behavior, as well as its underlying neural mechanisms, we used an experimental manipulation to induce both a scarcity and an abundance mindset within participants and examined the effects of both mindsets on participants’ willingness to pay for familiar food items while being scanned using fMRI. Results demonstrated that a scarcity mindset affects neural mechanisms related to consumer decision making. When in a scarcity mindset compared with an abundance mindset, participants had increased activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a region often implicated in valuation processes. Moreover, again compared with abundance, a scarcity mindset decreased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area well known for its role in goal-directed choice. This effect was predominant in the group of participants who experienced scarcity following abundance, suggesting that the effects of scarcity are largest when they are compared with previous situations when resources were plentiful. More broadly, these data suggest a potential neural locus for a scarcity mindset and demonstrate how these changes in brain activity might underlie goal-directed decision making.

The aim of the current study was threefold: (i) understand people’s willingness to engage in either punishment of the perpetrator or compensation of the victim in order to counteract injustice; (ii) look into the differences between victims of and witnesses to injustice; (iii) investigate the different role played by social preference and affective experience in determining these choices. The sample tested here showed an equal preference for punishment and compensation; neuroimaging findings suggested that compensation, as opposed to punishment, was related to Theory of Mind. Partially supporting previous literature, choosing how to react to an injustice as victims, rather than witnesses, triggered a stronger affective response (striatal and prefrontal activation). Moreover, results supported the idea that deciding whether or not to react to an injustice and then how severely to react are two distinct decisional stages underpinned by different neurocognitive mechanisms, i.e., sensitivity to unfairness (anterior insula) and negative affectivity (amygdala). These findings provide a fine-grained description of the psychological mechanisms underlying important aspects of social norm compliance.

Abstract. Asch's seminal research on ''Forming Impressions of Personality'' (1946) has widely been cited as providing evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect, suggesting that warmth-related judgments have a stronger influence on impressions of personality than competencerelated judgments (e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007;Wojciszke, 2005). Because this effect does not fit with Asch's Gestalt-view on impression formation and does not readily follow from the data presented in his original paper, the goal of the present study was to critically examine and replicate the studies of Asch's paper that are most relevant to the primacy-of-warmth effect. We found no evidence for a primacyof-warmth effect. Instead, the role of warmth was highly context-dependent, and competence was at least as important in shaping impressions as warmth.

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Both material resources (jobs, healthcare), and socio-psychological resources (social contact) decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. We investigated whether individual differences in perceived material and socio-psychological scarcity experienced during the pandemic predicted preference for cooperation, measured using two Public Good Games (PGGs), where participants contributed money or time (i.e., hours indoors contributed to shorten the lockdown). Material scarcity had no relationship with cooperation. Increased perceived scarcity of socio-psychological wellbeing (e.g., connecting with family) predicted increased preference for cooperation, suggesting that missing social contact fosters prosociality, whilst perceived scarcity of freedom (e.g., limited movement) predicted decreased willingness to spend time indoors to shorten the lockdown. The importance of considering individual differences in scarcity perception to best promote norm compliance is discussed.