Altruism
altruism
Choosing, fast and slow: Implications of prioritized-sampling models for understanding automaticity and control
The idea that behavior results from a dynamic interplay between automatic and controlled processing underlies much of decision science, but has also generated considerable controversy. In this talk, I will highlight behavioral and neural data showing how recently-developed computational models of decision making can be used to shed new light on whether, when, and how decisions result from distinct processes operating at different timescales. Across diverse domains ranging from altruism to risky choice biases and self-regulation, our work suggests that a model of prioritized attentional sampling and evidence accumulation may provide an alternative explanation for many phenomena previously interpreted as supporting dual process models of choice. However, I also show how some features of the model might be taken as support for specific aspects of dual-process models, providing a way to reconcile conflicting accounts and generating new predictions and insights along the way.
What to consider, when making strategic social decisions? An Eye-tracking investigation
In many societal problems, individuals exhibit a conflict between keeping resources (e.g., money, time or attention) to themselves or sharing them with another individual or group. The reasons motivating decisions in favor of others welfare can thereby vary from purely altruistic to completely strategic. Be it the stranger making an effort returning a lost valet to its rightful owner or a co-worker pitching in her fair share in a joint project. Actions like that create an environment that makes living together a pleasant experience. Hence, understanding how decisions determining the welfare of oneself and others are made is important for facilitating this behavior by building institutions that maximize the rate of cooperation in a society. To shed new light on such decision making processes I will present recent evidence from a set of process tracing experiments utilizing eye-tracking and economic games. Experiments will focus on the role of social preferences in the choice construction process and will identify mechanisms (i.e., search and processing depth, information weighting, and ignorance) through which they guide choice behavior. I will in particular focus on the differences and commonalitiesbetween strategic and altruistic decisions. Specifically, investigating to which extent people direct attention towards certain components of the decision situation in a context-dependent manner.
Blood is thicker than water
According to Hamilton’s inclusive fitness hypothesis, kinship is an organizing principle of social behavior. Behavioral evidence supporting this hypothesis includes the ability to recognize kin and the adjustment of behavior based on kin preference with respect to altruism, attachment and care for offspring in insect societies. Despite the fundamental importance of kinship behavior, the underlying neural mechanisms are poorly understood. We repeated behavioral experiments by Hepper on behavioral preference of rats for their kin. Consistent with Hepper’s work, we find a developmental time course for kinship behavior, where rats prefer sibling interactions at young ages and express non-sibling preferences at older ages. In probing the brain areas responsible for this behavior, we find that aspiration lesions of the lateral septum but not control lesions of cingulate cortices eliminate the behavioral preference in young animals for their siblings and in older rats for non-siblings. We then presented awake and anaesthetized rats with odors and calls of age- and status-matched kin (siblings and mothers) and non-kin (non-siblings and non-mothers) conspecifics, while performing in vivo juxta-cellular and whole-cell patch-clamp recordings in the lateral septum. We find multisensory (olfactory and auditory) neuronal responses, whereby neurons typically responded preferentially but not exclusively to individual social stimuli. Non-kin-odor responsive neurons were found dorsally, while kin-odor responsive neurons were located in ventrally in the lateral septum. To our knowledge such an ordered representation of response preferences according to kinship has not been previously observed and we refer this organization as nepotopy. Nepotopy could be instrumental in reading out kinship from preferential but not exclusive responses and in the generation of differential behavior according to kinship. Thus, our results are consistent with a role of the lateral septum in organizing mammalian kinship behavior.