Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA.
Neuron. 2011 May 12;70(3):560-72. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2011.02.056.
Why do people often choose to cooperate when they can better serve their interests by acting selfishly? One potential mechanism is that the anticipation of guilt can motivate cooperative behavior. We utilize a formal model of this process in conjunction with fMRI to identify brain regions that mediate cooperative behavior while participants decided whether or not to honor a partner's trust. We observed increased activation in the insula, supplementary motor area, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), and temporal parietal junction when participants were behaving consistent with our model, and found increased activity in the ventromedial PFC, dorsomedial PFC, and nucleus accumbens when they chose to abuse trust and maximize their financial reward. This study demonstrates that a neural system previously implicated in expectation processing plays a critical role in assessing moral sentiments that in turn can sustain human cooperation in the face of temptation.
当人们可以通过自私自利的行为更好地为自己谋取利益时，为什么他们常常选择合作？一个潜在的机制是，对罪恶感的预期可以激发合作行为。我们利用这个过程的一个正式模型，结合 fMRI 来识别在参与者决定是否尊重合作伙伴的信任时介导合作行为的大脑区域。当参与者的行为与我们的模型一致时，我们观察到脑岛、辅助运动区、背外侧前额叶皮层（PFC）和颞顶联合区的活动增加，而当他们选择滥用信任并最大化他们的财务奖励时，我们发现腹内侧 PFC、背侧内侧 PFC 和伏隔核的活动增加。这项研究表明，一个先前涉及预期处理的神经系统在评估道德情感方面起着关键作用，而这些情感反过来又可以在面对诱惑时维持人类的合作。
