Brain Science Institute, Tamagawa University, 6-1-1, Tamagawagakuen, Machida, Tokyo, Japan.
Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan.
Sci Rep. 2023 Jan 25;13(1):1419. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-27609-0.
Humans form complex societies in which we routinely engage in social decision-making regarding the allocation of resources among ourselves and others. One dimension that characterizes social decision-making in particular is whether to prioritize self-interest or respect for others-proself or prosocial. What causes this individual difference in social value orientation? Recent developments in the social dual-process theory argue that social decision-making is characterized by its underlying domain-general learning systems: the model-free and model-based systems. In line with this "learning" approach, we propose and experimentally test the hypothesis that differences in social preferences stem from which learning system is dominant in an individual. Here, we used a non-social state transition task that allowed us to assess the balance between model-free/model-based learning and investigate its relation to the social value orientations. The results showed that proselfs depended more on model-based learning, whereas prosocials depended more on model-free learning. Reward amount and reaction time analyses showed that proselfs learned the task structure earlier in the session than prosocials, reflecting their difference in model-based/model-free learning dependence. These findings support the learning hypothesis on what makes differences in social preferences and have implications for understanding the mechanisms of prosocial behavior.
人类形成复杂的社会，在这些社会中，我们经常会在自我和他人之间分配资源的社会决策中进行权衡。社会决策的一个特点是，我们是优先考虑自身利益还是尊重他人——即自利还是亲社会。那么，这种社会价值取向的个体差异是由什么引起的呢？社会双过程理论的最新发展认为，社会决策的特点是其潜在的领域一般性学习系统：无模型系统和基于模型的系统。根据这种“学习”方法，我们提出并实验检验了这样一个假设，即社会偏好的差异源于个体中哪种学习系统占主导地位。在这里，我们使用了一个非社会状态转换任务，该任务允许我们评估无模型/基于模型学习之间的平衡，并研究其与社会价值取向的关系。结果表明，自利者更多地依赖基于模型的学习，而亲社会者更多地依赖无模型学习。奖励金额和反应时间分析表明，自利者在实验过程中比亲社会者更早地学习任务结构，反映了他们在基于模型/无模型学习依赖性上的差异。这些发现支持了关于是什么导致社会偏好差异的学习假设，并对理解亲社会行为的机制具有启示意义。
