ArticleCerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)2022
How resource sharing resists scarcity: the role of cognitive empathy and its neurobiological mechanisms.
Article in Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991), 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Self-allocation bias in performance-based cooperative decisions is driven by self-interest rather than distorted performance encoding.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Social value orientation modulates fairness decision-making in empathic contexts: evidence from event-related potentials and neural oscillations.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Article
- When resources run short: the inhibitory effect of economic scarcity on third-party punishment.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The effect of peer relationships on academic burnout among rural left-behind children: a chain mediating effect of social support and cognitive reappraisal.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Exploring individual differences in the impact of cognitive constraints on prosocial decision-making via intrinsic brain connectivity.Brain imaging and behavior · 2025Article
- Divergent Neural Mechanisms of Self-Concerned and Prosocial Decision-Making Under High and Low Cognitive Loads.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Scarcity and Cooperation: The Modulation of Social Norms.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Scarcity mindset facilitates empathy for social pain and prosocial intention: behavioral and neural evidences.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2025Article
- Evolutionary neural architecture search for automated MDD diagnosis using multimodal MRI imaging.iScience · 2024Article
- Social observation modulates the influence of socioeconomic status on pro-environmental behavior: an event-related potential study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Prosocial decision-making under time pressure: Behavioral and neural mechanisms.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Subjective socioeconomic status and income inequality are associated with self-reported morality across 67 countries.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Threat-induced anxiety and selfishness in resource sharing: Behavioral and neural evidence.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- Scarcity mindset reduces empathic responses to others' pain: the behavioral and neural evidence.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
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Abstract
Resource scarcity challenges individuals' willingness to share limited resources with other people. Still, lots of field studies and laboratory experiments have shown that sharing behaviors do not disappear under scarcity. Rather, some individuals are willing to share their scarce resources with others in a similar way as when the resource is abundant, which is crucial for the maintenance and development of human society. Here, we designed a novel paradigm in which subjects decided whether (and how much) to share an amount of "relieving resources" for counteracting unpleasant noises, which mimics real-life situations that people cost their own resources to help others escape from adversity. Overall, the robustness of resource sharing under scarcity was positively correlated with individual level of the cognitive component of empathy across two independent experiments. Resource insufficiency modulated the activations of several brain regions (including the TPJ, mPFC, and PCC) as well as the functional connection (from the rTPJ to the mPFC) within the mentalizing brain network, but the modulatory effect decreased as a function of cognitive empathy. We also applied the administration of oxytocin and found significant effects on sharing behavior among individuals with a higher level of cognitive empathy, but not their low-level counterparts. These findings highlight the importance of empathy to resource sharing under scarcity and explain the underlying neurobiological mechanisms.
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