SynthesisSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2021
A feature-based network analysis and fMRI meta-analysis reveal three distinct types of prosocial decisions.
Synthesis in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Common thought patterns reflect generosity, fairness, and social context.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Early life adversity shapes neural and behavioural responses to oxytocin during altruistic decision-making.Translational psychiatry · 2026Article
- Seeing and deciding to help: neural and attentional mechanisms of prosociality in younger and older adults.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- Chronic non-nutritive sweetener and free sugars consumption alters decision-making and risk-taking in young healthy adults.Frontiers in nutrition · 2026Article
- Neurocomputational basis of learning when choices simultaneously affect both oneself and others.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Competitiveness versus cooperativeness linked to leisure activities in young university students in Spain.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- A Quantitative Review of Brain Activation Maps for Mentalizing, Empathy, and Social Interactions: Specifying Commonalities and Differences.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Prosocial Helping Behavior: Conceptual Issues and Neural Mechanisms.Biological psychiatry · 2025Review
- Article
- Neural mechanisms of altruistic decision-making: EEG functional connectivity network analysis.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Social identification and paranoia.Royal Society open science · 2024Article
- Neural asymmetry in aligning with generous versus selfish descriptive norms in a charitable donation task.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Distinct neural networks of task engagement and choice response in moral, risky, and ambiguous decision-making: An ALE meta-analysis.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Prosocial decision-making under time pressure: Behavioral and neural mechanisms.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Neural responses underlying extraordinary altruists' generosity for socially distant others.PNAS nexus · 2023Article
- Towards a neurocomputational account of social controllability: From models to mental health.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Unselfish traits and social decision-making patterns characterize six populations of real-world extraordinary altruists.Nature communications · 2023Article
- The bright and dark sides of egoism.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2022Review
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Tasks that measure correlates of prosocial decision-making share one common feature: agents can make choices that increase the welfare of a beneficiary. However, prosocial decisions vary widely as a function of other task features. The diverse ways that prosociality is defined and the heterogeneity of prosocial decisions have created challenges for interpreting findings across studies and identifying their neural correlates. To overcome these challenges, we aimed to organize the prosocial decision-making task space of neuroimaging studies. We conducted a systematic search for studies in which participants made decisions to increase the welfare of others during functional magnetic resonance imaging. We identified shared and distinct features of these tasks and employed an unsupervised graph-based approach to assess how various forms of prosocial decision-making are related in terms of their low-level components (e.g. task features like potential cost to the agent or potential for reciprocity). Analyses uncovered three clusters of prosocial decisions, which we labeled as cooperation, equity and altruism. This feature-based representation of the task structure was supported by results of a neuroimaging meta-analysis that each type of prosocial decisions recruited diverging neural systems. Results clarify some of the existing heterogeneity in how prosociality is conceptualized and generate insight for future research and task paradigm development.
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