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Comprehensive summary of the second part of the book 'The students guide to social neuroscience'.
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Social Neuroscience - Key Terms ALL chapters 1-11 from the book 'The Student’s Guide to Social Neuroscience'
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Social Neuroscience - Key Terms chapters 8-11 from the book 'The Student’s Guide to Social Neuroscience'
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Samenvatting Neuroscience of Social Behavior and Emotional Disorders deel 2Jamie Ward: The Student’s Guide to Social Neuroscience
Chapter 7: Interacting with others
Interactions have been defined as dyadic behavior in which the participants actions are inter-
dependent such that each actor’s behavior is both a response to and a stimulus for the other
participant’s behavior.
Altruism is helping behavior that is considered selfless in that no personal gain is obtained.
Both cooperating and competitive behavior is evolutionary important (cooperating behavior makes
sure you belong to a group; competitive behavior makes sure you survive). In humans, cooperative
interactions are predicted upon trust, the belief that others will treat you fairly. We are capable of
trust may depend on our ability to understand that others have similar mental states to our own and
on our ability to form shared goals between individuals. People who receive the benefits of
cooperation but do not contribute to the group are termed freeloaders, which can result in social
exclusion or fines.
Tomasello (2009): There is an intrinsic desire to help in humans, because it Is rewarding. There are
also benefits of reciprocity behavior. There can be punishment for non-cooperation, called altruistic
punishment (an act of punishment that has no direct benefit to the punisher but comes at a cost to
the punisher). Lastly, humans have a desire to conform.
In social neuroscience, it is hard to conduct research on real-world social interactions. Participants
also respond differently when they believe they are interacting with a human relative to when they
believe they are interacting with a computer program. Another issue is the cultural shift from face-to-
face interactions to virtual ones. This may change the way that the social brain develops.
Altruism and helping behavior
Evolutionary biology has come up with several main mechanisms to explain the evolution of altruism:
1. Kin selection assumes that we help others who are related to us
If an individual helps their kin, then there is a greater chance that the helping trait will survive,
because there is a greater chance that their kin also carry the same trait. Helping traits will tend
to spread when the organism’s own reproduction (C) is smaller than the offset by the benefit to
the reproduction of its kin member (B), multiplied by the probability that the kin member
inherits the same helping behavior (r) = (C<rxB).
2. Reciprocal altruism assumes that we provide help to others in order to obtain help from
others in the future.
It is based on the economic concept of delayed trade. It requires an ability to distinguish
between conspecifics and to remember their previous behavior. The gain of mutual cooperation
is set to be greater than the loss for mutual non-cooperation: it is greater than the sum of its
parts. Cooperation emerges as a solution by having agents who selectively cooperate. The tit-for-
tat strategy is a strategy in which cooperation leads to cooperation and non-cooperation leads to
non-cooperation on a trial-by-trial basis. It is based on trusting (if someone always cooperates)
and forgiving (if someone switches back to cooperation). Punishing works less well.
3. Sexual selection assumes that displays of wealth and generosity enhance the mating success
of altruists.
Being generous and helpful may serve the function of enhancing one’s reputation by
demonstrating wealth and the ability to provide.
4. Indirect reciprocity assumes that one only needs to help individuals who are likely to help
you (even people you don’t know or who may never be met again). Fur such a strategy to be
beneficial it needs to be based on selective cooperation rather than indiscriminate
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, cooperation. The concept of reputation is central: helping others increases one’s reputation.
How people judge the reputation of strangers may probably depend on how others behave
towards each other, gossip or may be based on whether they belong to the ingroup. This
may be obtained via language and social norms and makes indirect reciprocity a human trait.
Sometimes, a person that is helped will then help another person instead of the helper. This
is called misplaced reciprocity.
Unconscious processes in social cognition (like bias) may tend to favor altruistic motives whereas
conscious processes may tend to bias towards selfishness.
At the individual level there may be inbuilt motivational
mechanisms that drive pro-social behavior. We also help others
because we care about their welfare. As such, many theories of
altruism suggest that empathy is a key component. Sometimes,
being altruistic is egoistic (to reduce one’s own distress).
à model of altruism by Piliavin
The empathy-altruism model of Batson is a theory that the
motivation to help is based on empathic concern for others (so
not to relieve one’s own distress). Empathic concern was found
to predict helping behavior even when taking into account selfish
motives such as a desire to escape aversive feelings, asocial
disapproval, guilt, shame or sadness. However, the model is
based on the assumption that people can reflect accurately to
their own feelings in imaged scenarios. In addition, the model
hinges on the assumption that there are clear distinctions
between self and other. The self and other can sometimes be blurred (by mirror neurons for
example), which questions the ideas of true altruism and true empathy.
People that choose to donate activate some of the same neural circuitry as receiving a pure reward.
This is the ‘joy of giving’ effect. There were some neural differences. A region in the ventromedial
PFC responded when participants decided to donate, and a region in the lateral OFC was activated by
decisions not to donate. In addition, there are neural and genetic differences in relation to the way
people donate.
Two of the key regions in the brain in relation to altruism are the right temporo-parietal junction and
the medial PFC. In addition, there is a tendency to behave more altruistically towards ingroups,
which is called parochial altruism. This challenge the notion that altruism is a purely ‘selfless’ act. It
was linked to the anterior insula (for emotional experiences). The decision not to help outgroup
members is linked to activity in the ventral striatum (for reward processing). Individual differences in
altruistic punishment (punishing the outgroup) is associated with activity in the striatum and to
genetic differences in post-synaptic dopamine turnover. When punishing an ingroup member for the
same violation, there was more activity in the mentalizing network (mPFC and TPJ).
Game theory and social decision making
It has been claimed that there is some common currency in neural terms between material and
social values. Lesions in the OFC causes impulsive behavior, socially non-cooperative behavior and
difficulties to form stable social relationships.
Game theory is a type of mathematical model that captures how an individual’s success in making
decisions is influenced by the decisions of others. In biology, it has been used to model evolution
based on the concept of fitness rather than decision (kin selection, altruism, reciprocal altruism).
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, In psychology, the game is applied to real life social decision-making. Humans take into account
factors other than their own personal gain when making social decisions. These findings gave rise to
the new field of neuroeconomics. It explains, using neural mechanisms, how individuals and groups
make economic decisions such as assigning value to competing choices, exchange and reciprocity,
and making best use of limited resources. These values can be monetary values or principles.
1. The prisoner’s dilemma: a two-player game in which the best individual strategy is non-
cooperation, but the best collective strategy is cooperation. Different options can be
presented by a payoff matrix, which lists the costs and benefits to each player based on the
different independent decision options. Participants often choose the collaborative option.
When doing multiple rounds, with money as reward, an effective thing to do is the tit-for-tat
strategy: cooperate initially and then copy the other player’s last move). A mutual
cooperation condition has the highest activity in regions such as the ventral stratum (only
when playing against other humans) and the OFC and vmPFC. Activity in these regions have
as much to do with trust and camaraderie as winning. Unreciprocated cooperation
engenders activity in regions such as the insula and the left amygdala (for emotional
processing). Viewing faces of people who previously intentionally cooperated activated
regions involved in face perception, emotion and reward processing and mentalizing. This
suggests that these regions also reflect attributions of responsibility.
2. The ultimatum game: a two-player game with a proposer and responder: the proposer is
given a pot of money and must decide what proportion of that money to give to the
responder; the responder can accept or reject the offer. Sometimes the responder considers
some offers as unfair (when 20% or less of the money is offered). Rejection of unfair offers is
motivated by a desire to punish the proposer. A comparison of unfair versus fair offers
showed activity in the bilateral insula (emotional signal related to unfairness), the anterior
cingulate cortex, the dorsolateral PFC (social bias based on fairness and less self-interest) and
the vmPFC (self-referential processing and reasoning the proposing intentions). Activation in
these areas were less seen in a game against a computer (no social aspect).
3. The public goods game: a multi-player game in which people may choose to contribute
different amounts to a common pot of money, but everybody receives the same benefits
irrespective of what they put in. The best collective option is for everyone to contribute, the
best individual option is not to contribute and to hope that everyone else contributes. 30% of
the players will consistently freeload.
4. The trust game: a two-player game with a trustee and investor; the trustee decides how
much money to invest and the investor decides how much to return. In a single game, the
best option for the trustee is to keep all the money for himself. In an iterative game, the
trustee needs to return a fair amount of money. Both the trust game and the public goods
game rely on trust. Trust may depend on social norms as to how to behave.
Unconditional trust is associated with greater activity in the medial prefrontal cortex than conditional
trust. This has to do with a mentalizing strategy: players who adopt an unconditional trust strategy
are more likely to focus on the trusting intentions of others. Trust has also to do with reputation for
cooperation, which can be learned via communication and interactions. Punishment of freeload
players are motivated by social norms. However, giving rewards was more beneficial for cooperation.
Unexpected rewards (the trustee gets more money) is associated with activity in the caudate nucleus
(dorsal striatum). This area is also important for learning to trust each other. After a few games, the
caudate nucleus was activated when the trustee was anticipating a favorable outcome.
Across all cultures there is a tendency not to simply behave according to self-interest but to impose
fairness norms in social interactions by engaging either in altruistic sharing of in punishing those who
violate this norm. However, there is substantial variation across cultures in the extent to which these
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