Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia 30322, USA.
Annu Rev Psychol. 2011;62:23-48. doi: 10.1146/annurev.psych.121208.131647.
Given that we live in highly complex social environments, many of our most important decisions are made in the context of social interactions. Simple but sophisticated tasks from a branch of experimental economics known as game theory have been used to study social decision-making in the laboratory setting, and a variety of neuroscience methods have been used to probe the underlying neural systems. This approach is informing our knowledge of the neural mechanisms that support decisions about trust, reciprocity, altruism, fairness, revenge, social punishment, social norm conformity, social learning, and competition. Neural systems involved in reward and reinforcement, pain and punishment, mentalizing, delaying gratification, and emotion regulation are commonly recruited for social decisions. This review also highlights the role of the prefrontal cortex in prudent social decision-making, at least when social environments are relatively stable. In addition, recent progress has been made in understanding the neural bases of individual variation in social decision-making.
鉴于我们生活在高度复杂的社会环境中，我们的许多最重要决策都是在社会互动的背景下做出的。从实验经济学的一个分支——博弈论中衍生出的简单而复杂的任务，已被用于实验室环境下的社会决策研究，并且各种神经科学方法已被用于探究潜在的神经系统。这种方法为我们了解支持信任、互惠、利他主义、公平、复仇、社会惩罚、社会规范遵从、社会学习和竞争等决策的神经机制提供了信息。涉及奖励和强化、疼痛和惩罚、心理化、延迟满足和情绪调节的神经系统通常被用于社会决策。这篇综述还强调了前额叶皮层在审慎的社会决策中的作用，至少在社会环境相对稳定时是这样。此外，人们在理解社会决策个体差异的神经基础方面也取得了新的进展。
