University of Bern, Institute of Psychology, Department of Social Psychology and Social Neuroscience, Fabrikstrasse 8, 3012, Bern, Switzerland.
University Hospital Bern, Department of Neurology, University Neurorehabilitation, Freiburgstrasse 10, 3010, Bern, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2019 Sep 25;9(1):13852. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-50322-w.
Intergenerational sustainability is probably humankind's most pressing challenge, exacerbated by the fact that the present generation has to incur costs in order to benefit future generations. However, people often fail to restrict their consumption, despite reporting strong pro-environmental attitudes. Recent theorising sees self-control processes as key component of sustainable decision-making and correlational studies support this view, yet causal evidence is lacking. Using TMS, we here disrupted an area known to be involved in self-control processes, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), to provide causal evidence as to whether diminished self-control leads to less intergenerational sustainability. Participants then engaged in a behavioural economic paradigm to measure sustainable decision-making towards the next generation. This adequately powered study could not find an effect of inhibiting the right dlPFC on intergenerational sustainability. This result holds when controlling for a number of relevant covariates like gender, trait self-control, pro-environmental attitudes, or cortical thickness at the stimulation site. We seek to explain this result methodologically and theoretically, and speculate about other brain areas that could be more strongly related to intergenerational sustainability, e.g. the mentalising network.
代际可持续性可能是人类最紧迫的挑战，而这一代人为了造福后代而不得不承担成本，这使得这一挑战更加严重。然而，尽管人们报告了强烈的亲环境态度，但他们往往无法限制自己的消费。最近的理论将自我控制过程视为可持续决策的关键组成部分，相关研究也支持这一观点，但缺乏因果证据。在这里，我们使用 TMS 干扰了一个已知与自我控制过程相关的区域，即右侧背外侧前额叶皮层（dlPFC），以提供因果证据，证明自我控制能力下降是否会导致代际可持续性降低。然后，参与者参与了一个行为经济学范式，以衡量对下一代的可持续决策。这项充分-powered 的研究没有发现抑制右侧 dlPFC 对代际可持续性的影响。当控制一些相关的协变量，如性别、特质自我控制、亲环境态度或刺激部位的皮质厚度时，结果仍然如此。我们试图从方法论和理论上解释这一结果，并推测与代际可持续性更相关的其他大脑区域，例如心理化网络。
