This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 24 Apr 2008, by Levy Rivers.
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24 Apr 08
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In one paper, Norihiro Sadato and colleagues found that making money and making a reputation engage much of the same reward circuitry in the brain—a finding that they say yields insight into what drives complex social behaviors.
In the other paper, Caroline Zink and colleagues mapped brain regions that are active when a person is processing information on social status. The researchers said their findings could yield insight into why social status can so profoundly affect behavior and health.
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In the social reward experiment, the subjects were told that strangers would be evaluating them based on information from a personality questionnaire and a video they made introducing themselves. The subjects were shown a picture of themselves, along with the word or phrase indicating how the strangers had evaluated them. However, the strangers did not really exist, and the researchers showed the subjects predetermined evaluations that allowed the researchers to manipulate the level of social reward experienced by the subjects.
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They wrote that their findings “indicate that the social reward of a good reputation should be incorporated into the neural model of human decision making in a similar manner to monetary rewards.” Thus, they wrote, experiments on decision making that use money-related games need to take into account that the subjects are exchanging more than money; they are also dealing in approval and reputation.
“Our findings indicate that the social reward of a good reputation in the eyes of others is processed in an anatomically and functionally similar manner to monetary rewards, and these results represent an essential step toward a complete neural understanding of human social behaviors,” concluded Sadato and colleagues.
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