Altruism: helping behavior that is considered selfless, there is no personal gain obtained and sometimes it is even costly to the helper.
What are the motives underlying helping?
- Intrinsic desire to help --> driven by prosocial motives such as empathy and fairness
- Benefits of reciprocity --> if I help you now, you might help me in the future
- Punishment for non-cooperation --> altruistic punishment
- Social conformity --> driven by the need to belong to a group
Evolutionary explanations for altruism:
- Kin selection: we help our family
- Reciprocal altruism: if I help you, you will help me in the future
- Sexual selection: altruism as an attractive trait
- Indirect reciprocity: helping people that you haven’t interacted with before and may never interact with again.
An individual motive can be empathy. Prosocial motives like empathic concern drives helping behavior. Three components of empathy:
- Emotion contagion
- facial mimicry can be measures with facial EMG
- Mirror neurons
- What is the goal of simulation? The relationship between helping and simulation is complex. Sympathize vs. personal distress
- Empathic concern
- Oxytocin; produced in the hypothalamus
- Perspective-taking/mentalizing
So:
- Helping could be motivated by:
- Empathic concern & perspective taking
- The need to reduce personal distress
- Two routes to helping
- Impulsive: based on ‘hunches’ (emotional impulses)
- Cost-benefit analyses
There are also social forces that influence helping behavior. Donating is for example the more social desirable response. Social conformity is not to be confused with social obedience (e.g. Milgram’s studies). Asch experiment is an example of social conformity.
Psychopaths display the opposite neurocognitive pattern of extreme altruists.
Helping friends --> dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex related to self regulating and strategic behavior
Helping strangers --> dorso-medial prefrontal cortex cognitive empathy and mentalizing
Neuroeconomics: combines neuroscience and games to reveal neural systems underlying social decision making
Response to fair offers (controlled for the amount of money):
Responses to unfair offers:
- Fair offers and cooperation induce striatum responses (reward)
- Unfair offers trigger insula response (disgust and anger)
- DLPFC response (biasing towards fair behavior)
Take home message:
- Humans make irrational decisions
- Neuroeconomics has shown brain circuits involved in
- Emotion: amygdala, insula
- Valuation/reward: verntral striatum, OFC, ACC
- Social cognition DMPFC
- Self-regulation: DLPFC
- Contextual factors might determine the relative contribution of these circuits
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