Translational Social Neuroscience Unit, Department of Psychiatry, Psychosomatics, and Psychotherapy, University of Wuerzburg, Wuerzburg, Germany.
Institute of Medical Psychology, Faculty of Medicine, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Soc Neurosci. 2022 Oct;17(5):441-461. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2022.2115550. Epub 2022 Sep 5.
Financial incentives are commonly used to motivate behaviors. However, there is also evidence that incentives can impede the behavior they are supposed to foster, for example, documented by a decrease in blood donations if a financial incentive is offered. Based on these findings, previous studies assumed that prosocial motivation is shaped by incentives. However, so far, there is no direct evidence showing an interaction between financial incentives and a specific prosocial motive. Combining drift-diffusion modeling and fMRI, we investigated the effect of financial incentives on empathy, i.e., one of the key motives driving prosocial decisions. In the empathy-alone condition, participants made prosocial decisions based on empathy. In the empathy-bonus condition, they were offered a financial bonus for prosocial decisions, in addition to empathy induction. On average, the bonus enhanced the information accumulation in empathy-based decisions. On the neural level, this enhancement was related to the anterior insula, the same region that also correlated with empathy ratings. Moreover, the effect of the financial incentive on anterior insula activation was stronger the lower a person scored on empathy. These findings show that financial incentives enhance prosocial motivation in the absence of empathy.
经济激励通常被用来激励行为。然而，也有证据表明激励措施会阻碍他们原本想要促进的行为，例如，如果提供经济激励，献血量会减少。基于这些发现，之前的研究假设亲社会动机是由激励塑造的。然而，到目前为止，还没有直接的证据表明经济激励和特定的亲社会动机之间存在相互作用。我们结合漂移扩散模型和 fMRI，研究了经济激励对同理心的影响，即驱动亲社会决策的关键动机之一。在同理心单独条件下，参与者根据同理心做出亲社会决策。在同理心奖金条件下，除了同理心诱导外，他们还可以为亲社会决策获得经济奖金。平均而言，奖金增强了基于同理心的决策中的信息积累。在神经水平上，这种增强与前脑岛有关，前脑岛也是与同理心评分相关的区域。此外，经济激励对前脑岛激活的影响在同理心得分较低的人身上更强。这些发现表明，在没有同理心的情况下，经济激励会增强亲社会动机。
