Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： As an important cognitive bias, the framing effect shows that individuals' decision preferences are sensitive to the verbal description (i.e., frame) of options. The social framing effect could be distinguished from the non-social one according to whether the decision would influence others. The psychological mechanisms of the non-social framing effect (e.g., Gain/Loss framing effect) and that of the social one are essentially different. When making non-social decisions, frames affect people’s judgment of which option is more beneficial or less risky. When making social decisions, frames affect people’s preferences through the influence of other-regarding concerns and social norms.In the present study, a new paradigm was developed to induce the social framing effect. We asked participants to make a tradeoff between economic benefits and the feelings of others; when participants showed a stronger preference for income maximization, the probability for their partners to receive a painful electrical shock would increase proportionally. This decision was described as either a “harm” to, or simply “not helping” other persons in two frame conditions. 30 participants (age: 20.58 ± 1.91 years old) were enrolled in the experiment and 24 of them were included in the final analysis. The resting-state functional magnetic resonance (rs-fMRI) data was acquired using the Echo Planar Imaging (EPI) sequence from a 3-T Siemens scanner. This scanning acquired 180 volumes with TR = 2 s (lasting 6 min). Rs-fMRI data were processed and analyzed using the DPABI and RESTplus toolbox to calculate the amplitude of low-Frequency Fluctuation (ALFF) and Functional Connectivity (FC). On the behavioral level, we found that participants made more prosocial decisions in the Harm frame compared to the Help frame condition, resulting in a significant social framing effect. For the resting fMRI analysis, we first run a whole-brain correlation analysis between ALFF and the behavioral index and found the ALFF of the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) could significantly predict the behavioral index of the social framing effect. Considering the observed social framing effect would result from different levels of moral conflict between Harm and Help frames, we predicted that it would be closely related to the moral network. Therefore, we further localized 12 seeds from a new, meta-analysis of functional MRI studies for moral processing. Seed-based FC analysis showed that the functional connectivity between the medial prefrontal cortex and the caudate was significantly associated with the behavioral index of the social framing effect. Multivariate machine learning-based regression analysis further confirmed these results, suggesting the importance of rTPJ and moral network for the observed social framing effect.The present study is based on a novel experimental paradigm, using resting functional imaging techniques to explore the brain mechanism of the social framing effect. We found that the ALFF value of the right TPJ and the strength of the functional connectivity value between the medial prefrontal lobe and the caudate within a moral network can effectively predict the social framing effect. This study is the very first one to explore the extent to which individual social decision-making can be influenced by verbal description and its underlying neural mechanisms, which shed light on the further exploration of individual differences in social decision-making.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Humans are a social species that are constantly involved in complex relationships, reacting to the actions of others, and intentionally or unintentionally changing our own behavior. Personality traits reflect the behavioral pattern of an individual's response to the environment, which also includes social behavior. In addition, the brain is also an important factor when discussing social networks. The brain provides biological mechanisms for human behavior, while social networks provide external triggers for these behaviors. Linking personality traits and brain activity to social networks can help us better understand the structure of group relationships, improve our understanding of individual human beings, and help us better predict individual social behaviors and find the rules of information transmission in interpersonal relationships. From the perspective of a network, we collected nine social networks from 94 undergraduate students in the same grade according to their different social needs. We used the graph theory and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the influence of personality traits on social networks based on individual popularity and closeness between individuals and the relationship between the similarity of brain resting-state functional connectivity and social distance between individuals. Specifically, regression analysis was carried out, with personality traits as the independent variables and the different degrees of social networks as the dependent variables. Then, a correlation analysis was performed for the social distance and similarity of personality traits. Finally, the correlation between the similarity of the brain networks and social distance was calculated. The results showed that (1) individuals with high conscientiousness were more popular in social networks requiring "trust" traits, while individuals with high agreeableness were more popular in social networks requiring "fun" traits. These findings showed that in the same group, there are different social networks according to social needs, and the popularity of individuals in different social networks is not similar as it will be affected by the corresponding personality traits; (2) In the social networks requiring "shared interests & values, " personality similarity and social distance between individuals were significantly negatively correlated. Personality similarity promotes interpersonal communication between individuals, which may be realized through interpersonal attraction induced by the similarity of values and interests; (3) In the same social network, there is a significantly negative correlation between similarities in functional connections (FCs) and social distance among individuals, and these FCs are mainly concentrated in the fronto-parietal task control network and the dorsal attention network. The similarity of resting brain FCs among individuals may promote interpersonal communication, possibly due to the similarity of individuals in cognitive control and environmental processing bias, which increases the interpersonal attraction and shortening the social distance between individuals. The results revealed the influence of personality traits on the structure of different social networks, the relationship between personality trait similarity among individuals, and the similarity between resting brain networks and social distance, which has important implications for understanding the structure of social networks, the formation rules, and the information transmission rules among them. In addition, this study discussed the relationship between the similarity of resting-state FC and social distance, providing new evidence for studies on brain synchronization in interpersonal communication and brain imaging evidence for the study of the relationship between the similarity of personality traits and social distance.#social networks, personality traits, resting-state functional connectivity
Hits
Hits
Downloads
Comment