Generalized Negative Reciprocity in the Dictator Game--How to Interrupt the Chain of Unfairness.

Humans are tremendously sensitive to unfairness. Unfairness provokes strong negative emotional reactions and influences our subsequent decision making. These decisions might not only have consequences for ourselves and the person who treated us unfairly but can even transmit to innocent third persons--a phenomenon that has been referred to as generalized negative reciprocity.

Neuronal correlates of social decision making are influenced by social value orientation-an fMRI study.

Our decisions often have consequences for other people. Hence, self-interest and other-regarding motives are traded off in many daily-life situations. Interindividually, people differ in their tendency to behave prosocial.

Effort increases sensitivity to reward and loss magnitude in the human brain.

It is ecologically adaptive that the amount of effort invested to achieve a reward increases the relevance of the resulting outcome. Here, we investigated the effect of effort on activity in reward and loss processing brain areas by using functional magnetic resonance imaging. In total, 28 subjects were endowed with monetary rewards of randomly varying magnitude after performing arithmetic calculations that were either difficult (high effort), easy (low effort) or already solved (no effort).

A reward prediction error for charitable donations reveals outcome orientation of donators.

The motives underlying prosocial behavior, like charitable donations, can be related either to actions or to outcomes. To address the neural basis of outcome orientation in charitable giving, we asked 33 subjects to make choices affecting their own payoffs and payoffs to a charity organization, while being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We experimentally induced a reward prediction error (RPE) by subsequently discarding some of the chosen outcomes.