ArticleHuman brain mapping2016
Diffusion of responsibility attenuates altruistic punishment: A functional magnetic resonance imaging effective connectivity study.
Article in Human brain mapping, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Brain responses to social punishment: a meta-analysis.Scientific reports · 2019Pooled it
- Love is analogous to money in human brain: Coordinate-based and functional connectivity meta-analyses of social and monetary reward anticipation.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2019Pooled it
- Brain responses to social norms: Meta-analyses of fMRI studies.Human brain mapping · 2018Pooled it
- Neurocomputational Mechanisms Linking Future Interaction Prospects to Reactive and Proactive Costly Punishment.Neuroscience bulletin · 2026Article
- The Influence of Social Relationships on Third-Party Punishment: The Roles of Relationship Type Congruence and Threat Perception.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Human cerebellum and social navigation: cerebello-cerebral connectivity using dynamic causal modelling.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Exploring the ethical values and social drivers behind consumer preferences for cruelty-free products.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- The Neurocomputational Mechanism Underlying Decision-Making on Unfairness to Self and Others.Neuroscience bulletin · 2024Article
- One step too far: social cerebellum in norm-violating navigation.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Article
- Understanding the cognitive and neuroimaging bases underlying the detrimental impact of sleep deprivation on reciprocity.iScience · 2024Article
- Moral judgment of objectionable online content: Reporting decisions and punishment preferences on social media.PloS one · 2024Article
- Neurocomputational Substrates Underlying the Effect of Identifiability on Third-Party Punishment.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- The confound of hemodynamic response function variability in human resting-state functional MRI studies.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- A novel approach to measure brain-to-brain spatial and temporal alignment during positive empathy.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Noninvasive Characterization of Functional Pathways in Layer-Specific Microcircuits of the Human Brain Using 7T fMRI.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- To Blame or Not? Modulating Third-Party Punishment with the Framing Effect.Neuroscience bulletin · 2022Article
- Empathy-based tolerance towards poor norm violators in third-party punishment.Experimental brain research · 2021Article
- FMRI hemodynamic response function (HRF) as a novel marker of brain function: applications for understanding obsessive-compulsive disorder pathology and treatment response.Brain imaging and behavior · 2021Article
- Deterioration from healthy to mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease mirrored in corresponding loss of centrality in directed brain networks.Brain informatics · 2019Article
- Shared responsibility in collective decisions.Nature human behaviour · 2019Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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 the diffusion of responsibility served as a mediator of context-dependent punishment. In the presence of putative others, participants who felt less responsible also punished less severely in response to norm violations. Our neural results revealed that underlying this behavioral effect was a network of interconnected brain regions. For unfair relative to fair splits, the presence of others led to attenuated responses in brain regions implicated in signaling norm violations (e.g., AI) and to increased responses in brain regions implicated in calculating values of norm violations (e.g., vmPFC, precuneus) and mentalizing about others (dmPFC). The dmPFC acted as the driver of the punishment network, modulating target regions, such as AI, vmPFC, and precuneus, to adjust altruistic punishment behavior. Our results uncovered the neural basis of the influence of diffusion of responsibility on altruistic punishment and highlighted the role of the mentalizing network in this important phenomenon. Hum Brain Mapp 37:663-677, 2016. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
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