Altruism is associated with an increased neural response to agency

Tankersley, Dharol; Stowe, Caroline; Huettel, Scott A.

doi:10.1038/nn1833

Cited by 175 publications

(131 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…A full development of ToM occurs at around 6 years of age; this development seems to be related to language acquisition (e.g., Garfield, Peterson & Perry, 2001;Milligan, Astington & Dack, 2007) and triadic interactions (Carpendale & Lewis, 2004). The underlying psychological and neural mechanisms of corollaries of ToM such as altruism, empathy, and deception are the focus of intense research efforts (e.g., Decety & Jackson, 2006;Spence, Farrow, Herford, Wilkinson, Zheng & Woodruff, 2001;Tankersley, Stowe & Huettel, 2007). ToM deficits are well documented in autism (e.g., Baron-Cohen, 2001) and schizophrenia (e.g., Brune, 2005); these deficits are increasingly being associated with brain dysfunction, most likely located in the more anterior region of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (Amodio & Frith, 2006).…”

Section: -Theory-of-mind (A) Tom and Self-awarenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-recognition, theory-of-mind, and self-awareness: What side are you on?

Morin

2011

Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition

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A fashionable view in comparative psychology states that primates possess self-awareness because they exhibit mirror self-recognition (MSR), which in turn makes it possible to infer mental states in others ("Theory-of-Mind"; ToM). In cognitive neuroscience, an increasingly popular position holds that the right hemisphere represents the center of self-awareness because MSR and ToM tasks presumably increase activity in that hemisphere. In this chapter I critically assess these two claims as follows. MSR should not be equated with full-blown selfawareness; for instance, evidence suggests that MSR only requires kinesthetic self-knowledge and does not involve access to one's mental events. ToM and self-awareness are fairly independent and should also not be taken as equivalent notions; to illustrate, ToM implies a focus of attention on others, not on the self, whereas self-awareness exclusively entails self-focus. MSR and ToM tasks engage medial and left brain areas-not sites solely located in the right hemisphere, as recent meta-analyses of brain-imaging studies clearly show. Other selfawareness tasks besides MSR and ToM tasks (e.g., self-description, autobiography) mostly recruit medial and left brain areas. And inner speech, produced by the left hemisphere and which primates lack, plays a significant role in self-referential activity; indeed, accidental loss of inner speech following brain injury leads to self-awareness deficits. The conclusions I will reach based on this analysis is that (1) primates that display MSR most probably do not possess introspective self-awareness, and (2) self-related processes most likely engage a distributed network of brain regions situated in both hemispheres.

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Section: -Theory-of-mind (A) Tom and Self-awarenessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Self-recognition, theory-of-mind, and self-awareness: What side are you on?

Morin

2011

Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition

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“…Recent neural evidence suggests that the RTPJ plays a crucial role in adopting a different viewpoint and shifting attention away from one's own immediate environment to others (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25) and to different times and locations (20-22, 26, 29). This region has also been implicated in empathy (31), moral reasoning (32,33), and altruistic behavior (34,35), for which perspective taking is required. Although previous studies on gambling have not addressed the role of perspective taking directly, they have also reported value-related activity in the intraparietal cortex, located near the TPJ (36,37).…”

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confidence: 99%

Rawlsian maximin rule operates as a common cognitive anchor in distributive justice and risky decisions

Kameda

Inukai

Higuchi

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Distributive justice concerns the moral principles by which we seek to allocate resources fairly among diverse members of a society. Although the concept of fair allocation is one of the fundamental building blocks for societies, there is no clear consensus on how to achieve "socially just" allocations. Here, we examine neurocognitive commonalities of distributive judgments and risky decisions. We explore the hypothesis that people's allocation decisions for others are closely related to economic decisions for oneself at behavioral, cognitive, and neural levels, via a concern about the minimum, worst-off position. In a series of experiments using attention-monitoring and brain-imaging techniques, we investigated this "maximin" concern (maximizing the minimum possible payoff) via responses in two seemingly disparate tasks: third-party distribution of rewards for others, and choosing gambles for self. The experiments revealed three robust results: (i) participants' distributive choices closely matched their risk preferences-"Rawlsians," who maximized the worst-off position in distributions for others, avoided riskier gambles for themselves, whereas "utilitarians," who favored the largesttotal distributions, preferred riskier but more profitable gambles; (ii) across such individual choice preferences, however, participants generally showed the greatest spontaneous attention to information about the worst possible outcomes in both tasks; and (iii) this robust concern about the minimum outcomes was correlated with activation of the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), the region associated with perspective taking. The results provide convergent evidence that social distribution for others is psychologically linked to risky decision making for self, drawing on common cognitive-neural processes with spontaneous perspective taking of the worst-off position.distributive justice | risky decisions | maximin rule | perspective taking | right temporoparietal junction T he "Occupy Wall Street" protests in New York garnered worldwide attention, highlighting growing concerns about wealth inequality. A remarkable feature of the protests was that not only the financially disadvantaged but middle-class citizens, who were relatively wealthy in the current economy, also joined the movement. Traditional economic models that assume utility only for self-related outcomes (1, 2) fail to explain such a mass phenomenon.However, there is one important psychological dimension that seems to characterize the wide civic involvement in the movement yet has been unaddressed in cognitive and social neuroscienceconcern about the lowest, worst-off outcomes. Notice that, in the "Occupy" protests, people were not just concerned about the inequality (variance) of wealth distribution generally, but specifically advocated increasing the incomes of society's most disadvantaged. John Rawls, an eminent modern social philosopher, similarly argued that the benefit to the least well-off should be maximized according to the "maximin principle" (maximizing th...

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“…But it is also referred to thinking about the self and processing of what feels like the right thing to do in a moral dilemma (Amodio and Frith 2006). We also find a higher activity of the right pSTC which is associated with self-reported altruism (Tankersley et al 2007) and willingness to give (Hare et al 2010). Considering these additional activations, we might ob- We further hypothesized that the altruist should exhibit neural activation in areas which are related to "frustration" in the sure-private-money case in contrast to the sure-donation case, because he expects the majority to reject the proposal which he wants to see pursued (H3).…”

Section: ) Instrumental Motives Altruistic Votersmentioning

confidence: 60%

The neuroeconomics of voting: Neural evidence of different sources of utility in voting.

Bischoff

Neuhaus

Trautner

et al. 2013

Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics

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Altruism is associated with an increased neural response to agency

Cited by 175 publications

References 14 publications

Self-recognition, theory-of-mind, and self-awareness: What side are you on?

Self-recognition, theory-of-mind, and self-awareness: What side are you on?

Rawlsian maximin rule operates as a common cognitive anchor in distributive justice and risky decisions

The neuroeconomics of voting: Neural evidence of different sources of utility in voting.

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