Disrupting the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Attenuates the Difference in Decision-Making for Altruistic Punishment Between the Gain and Loss Contexts

Abstract

Altruistic punishment are primary responses to social norms violations, its neural mechanism has also attracted extensive attention from researchers. In the present studies, we applied a low-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) while participants engaged in a modi ed Ultimatum Game (UG) (Study 1) and a modi ed third-party punishment game (Study 2) to probe the neural mechanisms affecting decision-making in altruistic punishment. Normally punishers intervene more often against and show more social outrage towards Dictators/Proposers who unfairly distribute losses than rather those who unfairly share gains. We found that disrupting the function of the left and right DLPFC with rTMS effectively obliterated this difference, making participants punish unfairly shared gains as often as they normally would punish unfairly shared losses. The inhibition of the DLPFC function will lead to the deviation of individual information integration ability and in uence the moderating effect of gain and loss contexts on altruistic punishment.Our ndings emphasize that DLPFC is closely related to altruistic punishment and provide causal neuroscienti c evidence.