ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Social discounting involves modulation of neural value signals by temporoparietal junction.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A feature-based network analysis and fMRI meta-analysis reveal three distinct types of prosocial decisions.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2021Pooled it
- Enhancement in dopamine reduces generous behaviour in women.PloS one · 2019Trial
- Brain stimulation reveals crucial role of overcoming self-centeredness in self-control.Science advances · 2016Trial
- Neural Correlates of Moral Judgment in Dilemma Versus Non-Dilemma Contexts.Brain and behavior · 2026Review
- Wired for Corruption: Inter-Brain Synchrony Encodes Bribery-Related Value Information and Predicts Bribery Agreement.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Diminished neural responses for greater numbers of lives at risk and lives lost in foreign countries.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Seeing and deciding to help: neural and attentional mechanisms of prosociality in younger and older adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Deciding for others diminishes model-based decision-making but depends on individual prosociality.NPJ science of learning · 2026Article
- Exploring individual differences in the impact of cognitive constraints on prosocial decision-making via intrinsic brain connectivity.Brain imaging and behavior · 2025Article
- Social inequity disrupts reward-based learning.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The neural vulnerabilities in reward processing in gambling disorder.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- Steeper social discounting after human basolateral amygdala damage.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Reducing financial misreporting behaviour with noninvasive brain stimulation: the moderating effect of moral judgement.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Autistic traits modulate neural and behavioral responses to social vs nonsocial rewards.Personality neuroscience · 2025Article
- Close relationship partners of impartial altruists do not report diminished relationship quality and are similarly altruistic.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Neural reward system reflects individual value comparison strategy in cost-benefit decisions.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Tipping the balance between fairness and efficiency through temporoparietal stimulation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Egalitarian preferences in young children depend on the genders of the interacting partners.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- A behavioral signature for quantifying the social value of interpersonal relationships with specific others.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- The involvement of rTPJ in intention attribution during social decision making: A TMS study.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Most people are generous, but not toward everyone alike: generosity usually declines with social distance between individuals, a phenomenon called social discounting. Despite the pervasiveness of social discounting, social distance between actors has been surprisingly neglected in economic theory and neuroscientific research. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural basis of this process to understand the neural underpinnings of social decision making. Participants chose between selfish and generous alternatives, yielding either a large reward for the participant alone, or smaller rewards for the participant and another individual at a particular social distance. We found that generous choices engaged the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). In particular, the TPJ activity was scaled to the social-distance-dependent conflict between selfish and generous motives during prosocial choice, consistent with ideas that the TPJ promotes generosity by facilitating overcoming egoism bias. Based on functional coupling data, we propose and provide evidence for a biologically plausible neural model according to which the TPJ supports social discounting by modulating basic neural value signals in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex to incorporate social-distance-dependent other-regarding preferences into an otherwise exclusively own-reward value representation.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.