Neural Correlates of Self-Construal Priming in the Ultimatum Game

Abstract

Research from cultural and social psychology has identified a central role of self-construal, or the way one views themselves in relation to others, in social cognition. Accordingly, it is plausible that self-construal plays an instrumental role in important aspects of decision-making relating to fairness considerations. Prior research has shown that priming methodology is a useful tool to experimentally isolate the effect of self-construal on social decision-making processes. In the current study we investigated the neural effects of self-construal priming on fairness considerations, using an Ultimatum Game setup (N = 97). Based on previous findings, we predicted an interaction between the self-construal prime and gender on Ultimatum Game behavior; males primed with interdependence would reject the offer relatively more compared to independence, and vice versa for females. As previous neuro-imaging research has established an instrumental role of the anterior insula (AI) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in the rejection of unfair offers, we expected higher rejection rates to be mirrored by increased activity in these regions. However, the analyses did not confirm these predictions. As further inspection of the data revealed a habituation effect, we performed a follow-up analysis on the first block (N = 59). This subsequent analysis revealed that priming interdependence resulted in reduced AI activity compared to priming independence, although no behavioral differences were observed. The difference was theorized to result from motivations as conflict avoidance and harmony maintenance, commonly associated with interdependence. Furthermore, the analysis revealed greater vmPFC activity for females compared to males for rejected offers, although this effect was not robust when controlled for trait self-construal. These follow-up analyses suggest that self-construal priming influences insula activity, as well as implicating an underlying role of trait self-construal in observed gender differences in vmPFC activity relating to fairness considerations.

Reconfiguration of the costly punishment network architecture in punishment decision‐making

“…Previous behavioral studies found that females were more averse to inequity than males (Croson & Gneezy, 2009; García‐Gallego et al., 2012; Solnick, 2001). Evidence from neuroimaging studies further showed that females exhibited greater activations than males in the emotional (e.g., dACC) and mentalizing (e.g., vmPFC) systems in response to unfair offers even in the absence of behavioral differences (Dulebohn et al., 2016; Flinkenflogel et al., 2019; Kopsida et al., 2016). These findings suggest that the psychological and neurocognitive processes associated with costly punishment are different in females from males.…”

Visualizing Research Trends on Culture Neuroscience (2008–2021): A Bibliometric Analysis

“…Clearly, cultural neuroscience has gradually emerged as the hottest research topic since 2014. At the technical level, fMRI has been widely used by scholars since 2019 (Flinkenflogel et al, 2019;Murray et al, 2020;Shkurko, 2020), culture and self have remained the focus of researchers (Russell et al, 2019;Chiao et al, 2020;Kwon et al, 2021), and adolescent has emerged as the intellectual theme in 2021 (Chen and Qu, 2021;Rapp et al, 2021). Thus, the use of fMRI technology, combined with cultural neuroscience methods to study the impact of Chinese and Western cultural differences on brain function, appeared to be the future research trend.…”

Representational similarity analysis of self‐ versus other‐processing: Effect of trait aggressiveness

“…Many factors, such as cultural biases and individual predispositions, influence self‐other discrimination. Many experimental paradigms, such as ultimatum game (Flinkenflogel et al, 2019; Ogawa et al, 2023) and social discounting task (Jones, 2022) have been used to investigate the factors involved in social interactions and self‐other discrimination. Thus, the neural correlates of in‐group and out‐group biases in this discrimination are convincingly demonstrated (Fallon et al, 2020; Saarinen et al, 2023).…”