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Neural responses underlying extraordinary altruists’ generosity for socially distant others

2023; Oxford University Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad199

2752-6542

Shawn A Rhoads, Katherine O’Connell, Kathryn Berluti, Montana L. Ploe, Hannah S Elizabeth, Paige Amormino, Joanna Li, Mary Ann Dutton, John W. VanMeter, Abigail A. Marsh,

Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

Most people are much less generous toward strangers than close others, a bias termed social discounting. But people who engage in extraordinary real-world altruism, like altruistic kidney donors, show dramatically reduced social discounting. Why they do so is unclear. Some prior research suggests reduced social discounting requires effortfully overcoming selfishness via recruitment of the temporoparietal junction. Alternatively, reduced social discounting may reflect genuinely valuing strangers' welfare more due to how the subjective value of their outcomes is encoded in regions such as rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and amygdala. We tested both hypotheses in this pre-registered study. We also tested the hypothesis that a loving-kindness meditation (LKM) training intervention would cause typical adults' neural and behavioral patterns to resemble altruists. Altruists and matched controls (