ArticleNature communications2024
The psychological, computational, and neural foundations of indebtedness.
Article in Nature communications, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Moral and perceptual conflict processing are implemented by distinct brain activation and functional connectivity patterns.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- How Indebtedness Affects Social Anxiety Among Chinese University Students: The Moderating Role of Renqing in the Mediation of Psychological Inflexibility.Psychiatry investigation · 2026Article
- Efficiency Recalibrates Social-Emotional Trade-Offs Behind Partner Choice in Direct Reciprocity through Intention-Specific Neural Bases.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Human neurocomputational mechanisms of guilt-driven and shame-driven altruistic behavior.eLife · 2025Article
- Divergent Neural Mechanisms of Self-Concerned and Prosocial Decision-Making Under High and Low Cognitive Loads.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- Reliability and validity of the revised indebtedness scale in Chinese university students.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Understanding the cognitive and neuroimaging bases underlying the detrimental impact of sleep deprivation on reciprocity.iScience · 2024Article
- Differences in the link between social trait judgment and socio-emotional experience in neurotypical and autistic individuals.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- The psychological, computational, and neural foundations of indebtedness.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Receiving a favor from another person may induce a negative feeling of indebtedness for the beneficiary. In this study, we explore these hidden costs by developing and validating a conceptual model of indebtedness across three studies that combine a large-scale online questionnaire, an interpersonal game, computational modeling, and neuroimaging. Our model captures how individuals perceive the altruistic and strategic intentions of the benefactor. These inferences produce distinct feelings of guilt and obligation that together comprise indebtedness and motivate reciprocity. Perceived altruistic intentions convey care and communal concern and are associated with activity in insula, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, while inferred strategic intentions convey expectations of future reciprocity and are associated with activation in temporal parietal junction and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. We further develop a neural utility model of indebtedness using multivariate patterns of brain activity that captures the tradeoff between these feelings and reliably predicts reciprocity behavior.
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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.