The Influence Of Reward And Punishment On Advice Giving: Evidence From Behavioral And FNIRS Research

Advice giving is the process in which the advisor tries to help the judge find a solution to a problem.Most of the previous studies explored the issue of advice giving from the perspective of advice-taking,ignoring the influence of the reward and punishment mechanism and the consequences of the judge’s decisions.And the brain mechanism research of advice giving mostly examined the brain activities of the advisor alone,very little attention paid on the intrinsic nature of the advice giving from the brain-to-brain perspective.Therefore,present study discussed the problem above in real time interaction.In Study 1,participants of the same gender were paired to act as the advisor and the judge respectively.Each pair was asked to complete an urn guessing game in the Judge-Advisor System paradigm.To investigate the influence of reward and punishment and the effect of decision-making consequences on the advice giving,a2(rewards-punishments: reward-punishment condition,non-reward-punishment condition)×2(decision consequence: informed condition,uninformed condition)mixed design was conducted in which the rewards-punishments is an intra-subject factor and the decision consequence is an inter-subject factor.Advice deviation(the degree to which the advice confidence deviates from the given probability of visual cues)was used as the dependent variable to measure the degree of the overestimation or underestimation of the advice confidence.And according to the advice deviations of advisor under different influence levels,the advice strategies can be divided into competitive strategy and defensive strategy.The results showed that rewardspunishments and decision consequence had no significant effect on the advice deviance,nor did they have any significant interactions.And except for the reward-punishment and informed condition,the other three conditions showed the tendency to systematically overestimate the advice confidence.In addition,the effect of reward and punishment on advice strategy was found in the uninformed condition.Also,there was no significant difference of judge’s rejection rate under different conditions.Further analysis showed that the rejection rate had a significant negative correlation with the accuracy rate of advice,rather than the confidence level of the advisor.Based on the results of Study 1,Study 2 only explored the effect of rewardspunishments in the uninformed condition.Meanwhile,the brain activities of both participants were recorded by functional near-infrared spectroscopy(f NIRS)simultaneously.The behavioral results showed that the advisor had no obvious advice strategy under the reward-punishment condition while mainly adopted defensive strategy in the non-reward-punishment condition.The hyperscanning results showed that in the reward-punishment condition,inter-brain synchronization(INS)in the right superior parietal gyrus(r SPG)was higher than that in the non-reward-punishment condition.In addition,under the condition of reward and punishment,the lower the INS in the r SPG,the greater the increase of advice deviation on the level of trial-by-trial,which led to the increase of the judge’s advice acceptance rate.In conclusion,rewards-punishments and decision consequence had no significant effect on advice deviance,and there was no significant interaction between them.Although the decision consequence had no significant effect on the advice strategy,rewards-punishments can affect the advice strategy.Also,only under the rewardpunishment condition,the advice taking behavior could be predicted by the inter-brain synchronization.More importantly,this prediction was mediated by the advisor’s adjustment of the advice deviance.These studies explored the influence of reward and punishment and decision consequences on advice giving,providing more evidence on behavioral and brain mechanisms of the influence of reward and punishment on advice strategy.