Changes in people's behavior and mentality in social situations may be due to hardwired properties of the brain, as recent research suggests. Nadege Bault of California Institute of Technology measured brain activity of participants in various social and isolated conditions to quantify the results.
Previous studies have shown that people are affected by social situations. However, past results only indicated behavioral correlations without physiological data identifying specific brain regions involved. Recent advances in technology allowed scientists to link behaviors to biological processes.
There are two questions addressed by this study. The first is to compare how people evaluate the outcomes of their decisions in social versus private settings. The second is to determine how evaluations of risky situations in social and private settings affect subsequent decisions.
It was hypothesized that participants will be more motivated to take risks in social settings in order to outperform their peers.
In order to test this, participants were divided into groups with different experimental conditions. All participants were instructed to choose to enter in one of two lotteries. Some were allowed to choose with knowledge of others' choices, while other participants made choices in isolation. They were subsequently informed of the results, and their brain activities were measured.
Results showed that the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a brain area involved in decision-making and behavioral flexibility, was more active when participants were in social settings. Furthermore, its activity levels also depended on how rewarding the win was as well as on previous outcomes. This supports the theory that social competition affects brain processes.
Findings in this study suggest that the mPFC is crucial in comparing one's own gains and the gains of others. In addition, mPFC activity was correlated with activity of the reward system in the brain.
Another brain region that was explored in this study is the striatum. The striatum is associated with the rewards pathway. In this study, the striatum showed increased activity when participants won in presence of other people compared to when they won in isolation.
By analyzing these two brain regions, scientists demonstrated that the brain can register social signals and use them to determine decisions made in future behavior. Participants with more wins in social settings tend to take greater risks in subsequent trials, again showing how social situation affects behavior.
The results of this study make sense in the realm of evolution. Animals must interact with each other in many situations. They have strong incentives to compete with each other in order to achieve social dominance. However, group-support is also essential to survival. In both cases, the brain must be able to integrate social cues in order to make appropriate choices.
Quantitative results from this study allowed localization of behaviors to specific brain structures, thus advancing the knowledge of how people function.
Authors of this study suggest further exploration of the difference between having strong competitors and high gains versus weak competitors and low gains. Results from this study did not indicate a difference, which indicates that mental processes between the two are highly similar. However, alternative hypotheses should be explored.
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