Diffusion of responsibility attenuates altruistic punishment: A functional magnetic resonance imaging effective connectivity study.

ABSTRACT: Humans altruistically punish violators of social norms to enforce cooperation and pro-social behaviors. However, such altruistic behaviors diminish when others are present, due to a diffusion of responsibility. We investigated the neural signatures underlying the modulations of diffusion of responsibility on altruistic punishment, conjoining a third-party punishment task with event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging and multivariate Granger causality mapping. In our study, participants acted as impartial third-party decision-makers and decided how to punish norm violations under two different social contexts: alone (i.e., full responsibility) or in the presence of putative other third-party decision makers (i.e., diffused responsibility). Our behavioral results demonstrated that

SUBMITTER: Feng C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6867458 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature