Cooperation In Social Dilemmas:from Gain Context To Loss Context

Cooperation is the cornerstone of the survival and development of mankind.As social beings,people need physical and emotional communication with others to maintain the continuation of species.But at the same time,individual and others’ or group interests often conflict sharply in social interaction.Facing the conflict,whether people could sacrifice personal interests to keep cooperation has the vital significance to individual happiness and fortunes of humans.The study of social dilemmas reflects the nature of conflict between individual and others’ or group interests,and covers many cooperation problems such as environmental pollution,resource shortage and global warming in today’s world.So it became a main concern of many disciplines for nearly 30 years,and also attracted a lot of psychologist to explore it.For now,a large number of psychological researches have revealed that people were willing to sacrifice personal interests to keep cooperation in social dilemmas,and this prosocially cooperative behavior seemed to be an intuitive response.However,social dilemmas in previous studies were often in the gain context,in which people have to decide whether or not to reduce individual gains in order that others or group get more gains.But,in real world,there also exist many situations in which people had to decide whether or not to share more losses in order to reduce others’ or group losses.Then,confronted with social dilemmas in loss context,can people still make prosocially cooperative decision?And how is it different from cooperative behavior in social dilemmas in gain context?Further studies need be made to answer these questions.In addition,people would spend more cost for cooperative behavior in social dilemmas in loss context than in gain context.Therefore,exploring cooperative behavior in social dilemmas in loss context could profoundly reveal prosocial nature of human.In view of this,based on classic social dilemmas tasks,this study sought to investigate cooperative behavior and its characteristic in social dilemmas in the loss context.Additionally,using functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI),this study also intended to explore the neural basis of cooperative behavior in social dilemmas in the loss context.Four experiments were executed in the present study.In experiment 1,we explored the cooperative behavior in public goods dilemmas and common resources dilemmas in the gain and loss contexts.We found that participants showed higher level of cooperative behavior in both contexts,and they cooperated more in the gain context than in the loss context.These results indicated that the prosocially cooperative behavior in social dilemmas was widespread even in the loss context.In experiment 2,we manipulated decision time to explore how time stress influenced cooperative behavior in social dilemmas.We found that time stress upgraded the level of prosocially cooperative behavior in both contexts,indicating that cooperative behavior in social dilemmas was still an intuitive response even in the loss context.Using functional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI)technology,we explored how the loss and gain contexts modulated the neural basis of decision-making process of cooperation in experiment 3.We found that participants showed higher level of cooperative behavior in both contexts.The activities in right dorsal medial prefrontal cortex,right inferior parietal lobule,right precuneus and right ventral medial prefrontal cortex were associated with the decision-making process of cooperation,and the loss context strengthened the association between the inferior parietal lobule activation and decision-making process of cooperation.These results indicated that,even in the one-shot interaction under loss context,participants still exhibited preference for cooperation;and participants did more mentalizing about other’s intentions when deciding to cooperate,especially in the loss context.On the basis of experiment 3,we further investigated in experiment 4 how the loss and gain contexts modulated the neural responses to mutual cooperation.We found that participants showed higher level of cooperative behavior in both contexts.stronger activities in the orbitofrontal cortex were observed for mutual cooperation compared with the other three outcomes in both contexts,while stronger activation in ventral striatum associated with mutual cooperation was observed in the gain context only.These results indicated that,even in the one-shot interaction under loss context,participants still exhibited preference for cooperation and the rewarding experience from a mutually cooperative social interaction activated the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex.To sum up,results of the current study showed that:(1)Prosocially cooperative behavior in social dilemmas was an intuitive response and widespread in the gain and loss contexts.(2)The loss context had an negative influence on prosocially cooperative behavior;but this influence was modulated by types of social dilemmas.(3)The decision-making process of cooperation were associated with activities in right inferior parietal lobule,dorsal medial prefrontal cortex and right ventral medial prefrontal cortex,indicating participants did more mentalizing about other’s intentions when deciding to cooperate.(4)Mutually cooperative social interaction,as a type of social reward represented in the ventral striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex,is inherently rewarding.