Functional Connectivity Basis and Underlying Cognitive Mechanisms for Gender Differences in Guilt Aversion

Abstract

Prosocial behavior is pivotal to our society. Guilt aversion, which describes the tendency to reduce the discrepancy between a partner’s expectation and his/her actual outcome, drives human prosocial behavior as does well-known inequity aversion. Although women are reported to be more inequity averse than men, gender differences in guilt aversion remain unexplored. Here, we conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study ( n = 52) and a large-scale online behavioral study ( n = 4723) of a trust game designed to investigate guilt and inequity aversions. The fMRI study demonstrated that men exhibited stronger guilt aversion and recruited right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)-ventromedial PFC (VMPFC) connectivity more for guilt aversion than women, while VMPFC-dorsal medial PFC (DMPFC) connectivity was commonly used in both genders. Furthermore, our regression analysis of the online behavioral data collected with Big Five and demographic factors replicated the gender differences and revealed that Big Five Conscientiousness (rule-based decision) correlated with guilt aversion only in men, but Agreeableness (empathetic consideration) correlated with guilt aversion in both genders. Thus, this study suggests that gender differences in prosocial behavior are heterogeneous depending on underlying motives in the brain and that the consideration of social norms plays a key role in the stronger guilt aversion in men.

Gender differences in guilt aversion in Korea and the United Kingdom

“…Guilt aversion includes an aspect of normative behavior elicited by experience (i.e., rulebased decision making [28]). Our current results and our previous study [15] show that men utilize rule-based strategies more in the U.K. and Japan. Simultaneously, guilt aversion represents social pressure and may be related to sensitivity to negative emotions [10].…”

“…Player A, anticipating this action, will choose Z and produce the allocation of the money payoffs 𝑧 𝐴 and 𝑧 𝐵 . This online trust game was also used in our previous study [15].…”

Gender differences in guilt aversion in Korea and the United Kingdom

“…For inequity, Fehr and Schmidt's model [26], which splits inequity into advantages and disadvantages, is commonly used. However, as we reported previously [15], the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) between these two models showed that for 3,714 out of the 4,723 participants (78.6%) the absolute difference for the inequity model was selected. Therefore, we also compared the BIC between Fehr and Schmidt's model [26] and the absolute difference model in the present study.…”

“…Guilt aversion is an important factor of cooperation that lives up to the expectations of others, since people suffer from guilt if they disappoint others [10,11,12,13] (see Materials and Methods for a more detailed definition). Both laboratory and field experiments have supported this theory for populations in both the East and the West (e.g., East [14,15,16], West [11,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24]).…”

“…Our recent study [15] based on functional magnetic resonance imaging and online behavioral (Japanese participants; n = 4,723; 2,737 women) experiments reported that men show stronger guilt aversion than women. The study also revealed that the Big Five conscientiousness (rule-based decision making) correlates only with guilt aversion in men, while Big Five agreeableness (empathetic consideration) correlates with guilt aversion in both genders.…”