如何公平分配商品是社会决策的关键问题。广泛的研究表明,人们不会自私地最大化自己的利益,但也要考虑其他人是如何受到影响的。然而,大多数关于公平相关行为背后的心理过程的解释都隐含着对公平的评估有些稳定。在本文中,我们提出了一个新任务的结果,重新分配游戏,其中两名玩家收到由计算机确定的分配,在一半的试验中,一个玩家有随后的可能性来改变这个分配。重要的是,在收到分配之前,展示了球员们各自的财务状况,他们各自在之前的简单任务中的表现,或者随机信息,同时使用功能神经成像进行扫描。不出所料,我们的结果证明,如果有机会,参与者平均将近一半的钱分配给匿名的其他人。然而,我们的发现进一步表明,参与者以动态的方式使用提供的信息,揭示了人们重新分配货币的基本原则-即基于优点,需要,或相等-动态切换。在神经层面,在查看计算机生成的分配时,我们分别确定了与上下文无关的不公平和上下文相关的公平信息相关的右侧和左侧背外侧前额叶皮层的活动.同时,颞顶和前突的活动代表了相邻和部分重叠集群中这些不同类型的与公平相关的信息。最后,我们观察到前突和壳核的活动模式与参与者随后的重新分配决定最明显相关.一起,我们的研究结果表明,参与者使用与认知控制和心理理论相关的网络来判断分配是公平还是不公平,同时在特定上下文中可能构成公平分配的内容之间动态切换。
How to fairly allocate goods is a key issue of social decision-making. Extensive research demonstrates that people do not selfishly maximize their own benefits, but instead also consider how others are affected. However, most accounts of the psychological processes underlying fairness-related behavior implicitly assume that assessments of fairness are somewhat stable. In this paper, we present results of a novel task, the Re-Allocation Game, in which two players receive an allocation determined by the computer and, on half of the trials, one player has the subsequent possibility to change this allocation. Importantly, prior to the receipt of the allocation, players were shown either their respective financial situations, their respective performance on a previous simple task, or random information, while being scanned using functional neuroimaging. As expected, our results demonstrate when given the opportunity, participants allocated on average almost half the money to anonymous others. However, our findings further show that participants used the provided information in a dynamic manner, revealing the underlying principle based on which people re-allocate money - namely based on merit, need, or equality - switches dynamically. On the neural level, we identified activity in the right and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortices related to context-independent inequity and context-dependent fairness information respectively when viewing the computer-generated allocations. At the same time, activity in the temporoparietal and
precuneus represented these different types of fairness-related information in adjacent and partially overlapping clusters. Finally, we observed that the activity pattern in the
precuneus and putamen was most clearly related to participants\' subsequent re-allocation decisions. Together, our findings suggest that participants judge an allocation as fair or unfair using a network associated with cognitive control and theory-of-mind, while dynamically switching between what might constitute a fair allocation in a particular context.