Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Psychophysiology. 2011 Jul;48(7):973-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2010.01163.x. Epub 2010 Dec 22.
Most of us can appreciate that it feels worse to fail when people around you are successful than when others are also failing. Indeed, comparison with other individuals is of central importance within social groups. Despite the importance of relative success or failure for human decision making and even well-being, the underlying neurobiological substrate of this social comparison process is not well understood. In the present study, ERPs were recorded while two participants received feedback on both their own, and the other participant's performance on each trial. The results showed that medial frontal negativity, an ERP component associated with deviations from the desired outcome, is particularly enhanced when an individual's own outcomes are worse than those of others. These results indicate that the way the brain evaluates the success of our actions is crucially dependent on the success or failure of others.
我们大多数人都能体会到，当你周围的人成功时，你失败的感觉比别人失败时更糟糕。事实上，与他人的比较在社会群体中至关重要。尽管相对成功或失败对人类决策甚至幸福感很重要，但这种社会比较过程的神经生物学基础还不是很清楚。在本研究中，当两名参与者在每次试验中都收到关于自己和另一名参与者表现的反馈时，记录了 ERPs。结果表明，内侧前额负向波，一种与期望结果偏差相关的 ERP 成分，在个体自身的结果比他人差时特别增强。这些结果表明，大脑评估我们行为成功的方式在很大程度上取决于他人的成功或失败。
