Monetary Favors and Their Influence on Neural Responses and Revealed Preference

Abstract

Favors from a sender to a receiver are known to bias decisions made by the recipient, especially when the decision relates to the sender, a feature of social exchange known as reciprocity. Using an art-viewing paradigm possessing no objectively correct answer for preferring one piece of art over another, we show that sponsorship of the experiment by a company endows the logo of the company with the capacity to bias revealed preferenceforartdisplayednexttothelogo.Merelyofferingtosponsortheexperimentsimilarlyendowedthegesturinglogoofthecompanywith the capacity to bias revealed preferences. These effects do not depend upon the size of the displayed art or the proximity of the sponsoring logo to the piece of art. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that such monetary favors do not modulate a special collection of brain responses but instead modulate responses in neural networks normally activated by a wide range of preference judgments. The results raise the important possibility that monetary favors bias judgments in domains seemingly unrelated to the favor but nevertheless act in an implicit way through neural networks that underlie normal, ongoing preference judgments.

Domain expertise insulates against judgment bias by monetary favors through a modulation of ventromedial prefrontal cortex

“…paintings except for the visual presentation, and thus increased preference for paintings presented next to the sponsoring logo is considered a sponsorship effect. Controls showed greater average preference for sponsor compared with nonsponsor paintings (paired t = 3.02; df = 19; P < 0.006), demonstrating a sponsorship effect in line with our previous study (5). However, there was no effect of sponsorship within the expert group (paired t = 0.69; df = 19; P < 0.49).…”

“…Similar results have been found in monkey electrophysiology experiments (21)(22)(23). Neuroimaging studies have expanded these findings by demonstrating that value signals in the VMPFC can be modulated by cognitive inputs (1)(2)(3)(4)(5). We hypothesized that susceptibility to the sponsorship effect would modulate the response in the VMPFC in the two conditions (sponsor and nonsponsor), but that mitigation of the sponsorship effect would not lead to a modulation of the value signals computed in the VMPFC.…”

“…In accordance with our a priori hypothesis, we applied SVC (30) to correct for multiple comparisons in reporting these results in the VMPFC. We identified the search volume using MNI coordinates (0 48 −16) that overlap with activity reported in two related studies (2,5). No other brain regions correlated with preference across sponsorship in the two groups in a whole-brain analysis (P < 0.001, uncorrected).…”

“…One major hypothesis concerning judgment bias is that expertise in a domain tends wholly or in part to insulate against the biasing influences of favors. In this article, we build upon previously published work (5) to test this idea directly.…”

Who will guard the guards? Medical leadership and conflict of interest in South African healthcare

“…[19] Even small gifts have an effect -raters who denied conscious awareness of influence scored artwork higher if accompanied by the logo of the group subsidising their participation in the trial, and accompanying magnetic resonance images showed clear evidence of increased venteromedial prefrontal cortex activity (an area considered to influence preference judgements). [20] …”