ArticleScientific reports2018
Manipulation of Pro-Sociality and Rule-Following with Non-invasive Brain Stimulation.
Article in Scientific reports, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 26 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social learning dynamically shapes moral decision-making by biasing subjective valuation.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Why people follow rules.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Neural asymmetry in aligning with generous versus selfish descriptive norms in a charitable donation task.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Cathodal HD-tDCS above the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex increases environmentally sustainable decision-making.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Article
- Effects of transcranial direct current stimulation over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on fairness-related decision-making.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Transcranial electric stimulation as a neural interface to gain insight on human brain functions: current knowledge and future perspective.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Review
- Article
- When Helping Is Risky: The Behavioral and Neurobiological Trade-off of Social and Risk Preferences.Psychological science · 2021Article
- Rule Following Mitigates Collaborative Cheating and Facilitates the Spreading of Honesty Within Groups.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Decisions are often governed by rules on adequate social behaviour. Recent research suggests that the right lateral prefrontal cortex (rLPFC) is involved in the implementation of internal fairness rules (norms), by controlling the impulse to act selfishly. A drawback of these studies is that the assumed norms and impulses have to be deduced from behaviour and that norm-following and pro-sociality are indistinguishable. Here, we directly confronted participants with a rule that demanded to make advantageous or disadvantageous monetary allocations for themselves or another person. To disentangle its functional role in rule-following and pro-sociality, we divergently manipulated the rLPFC by applying cathodal or anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). Cathodal tDCS increased participants' rule-following, even of rules that demanded to lose money or hurt another person financially. In contrast, anodal tDCS led participants to specifically violate more often those rules that were at odds with what participants chose freely. Brain stimulation over the rLPFC thus did not simply increase or decrease selfishness. Instead, by disentangling rule-following and pro-sociality, our results point to a broader role of the rLPFC in integrating the costs and benefits of rules in order to align decisions with internal goals, ultimately enabling to flexibly adapt social behaviour.
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Registered trials
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.