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Introduction to social neuroscience

• Social neuroscience aims to understand the biological systems underlying people's thoughts, feelings, and actions in the social context.

• It has gained popularity among scholars, practitioners, and the general public.

• Social neuroscience has applications in economics, health, and law.

Importance of social neuroscience findings

• Neuroscientific evidence, especially accompanied by brain images, is perceived as more credible than other types of scientific evidence.

• Insights and methods from social neuroscience are used to explain, predict, and change behavior.

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Concerns about reverse inference

• Reverse inference is the assumption that a certain mental process can be inferred from the observed activity of a biological system.

• Brain activity has been used to make assumptions about preferences, knowledge, and behavior.

• However, reverse inference often falls victim to a logical fallacy due to the lack of understanding of cerebral functions.

Challenges in applying reverse inference to applied social domains

• Applied social domains involve high-level cognitive processes, making reverse inference more challenging.

• The complexity of theoretical constructs in these domains leads to a wide range of unspecific brain activations.

• Brain responses to social stimuli are affected by various factors such as stimulus format, participant expertise, expectations, personality, and social environment.

Ecological validity of neuroscience experiments

• Most neuroscience methods impose constraints on participants that prevent natural reactions.

• Participants are usually aware of being observed, leading to anxiety and impression management concerns.

• The multiplicity of trials in neuroscience studies can be tedious and exhausting for participants, leading to biases and differences from real-world situations.

• The social context in neuroscience studies is often limited to pictures, videos, or vignettes without direct interpersonal contact.

Conclusion

• Social neuroscience has applications in economics, health, and law.

• Reverse inference and ecological validity are important concerns in applying social neuroscience findings.

• Guidelines and good practices should be followed to address these concerns.

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• Social neuroscience research is often conducted with WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) participants, but findings are applied to non-WEIRD populations.

  • Cultural variations in processes such as visual perception, spatial reasoning, categorization, fairness, cooperation, and moral reasoning have been observed in behavioral and neuroimaging studies.

• Question of generalizability and reproducibility of research findings is important in social neuroscience.

  • Biases such as flexible statistical analyses, post-hoc alterations to hypotheses, low statistical power in neuroimaging studies, and the file drawer problem can distort the depiction of brain functioning.

• Review focuses on economics, health, and law as applied disciplines that draw from social neuroscience.

  • Goal is to illustrate how social neuroscience findings are used to address societal issues, address limitations and suggest guidelines for good practice.

• Social neuroscience offers various methods to address questions, but this review mainly focuses on neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies.

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2. Economics

• Neuroeconomics integrates ideas and methods from psychology, economics, and cognitive neuroscience to produce more robust models of economic decision-making.

• Game theory, particularly the Ultimatum Game, is widely used in neuroeconomics to study strategic behavior and fairness.

• Neuroscientific studies have shown that economic choices may rely on the same brain circuitry, but seemingly similar economic behaviors may engage different brain mechanisms.

• Reward processing in economics is influenced by the social context.

  • Brain reward system reacts similarly to social and monetary rewards, activating the ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC), and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC).

  • Trustworthiness and social approval also activate reward processing brain regions.

• Differences exist in the processing of social and non-social rewards, with social rewards engaging social cognition brain systems and striatal regions more.

• Unfair offers made by human agents in the Ultimatum Game activate the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and anterior insula to a greater extent than offers made by computer agents.

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Social decision-making and neural processing

• Social decision-making relies on different neural processing than non-social decision-making.

• Studies have compared individuals with optimal brain function to those with brain lesions or underdeveloped brains to understand why people make different economic decisions.

• Researchers studied rejection rates in the ultimatum game among VMPC lesion patients and control subjects, finding that VMPC lesion patients showed an increase in rejection rates correlated with perceived unfairness of offers.

• Neuroscientists examined developmental changes in brain regions associated with reactions to unfair offers in the ultimatum game, finding that younger adolescents were less affected by intentions and showed a higher rejection rate of unintentional unfair offers.

Limitations of social neuroscience in economics

• The field of economics has long operated with a ban on using deception.

• Deception is mostly considered permissible in social neuroscience, but manuscripts on economic decision-making may be rejected when reviewed by economists or submitted to economics journals.

• Combining insights from social and economic neuroscience is difficult due to opposing opinions on the permissibility of deception.

• Social neuroscientists can generate new experimental paradigms to avoid using deception, facilitating the integration of social neuroscience and economics findings.

• Reverse inference is an issue in neuroeconomics, but theory-driven experimental designs and meta-analyses can help interpret brain activations with more confidence.

• Most conclusions in social neuroscience are based on brain data from university students, which may poorly reflect real-world economic decision-makers.

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Influence of social context on health outcomes

• The social context has a pervasive influence on health outcomes.

• Social standing, quality of social interactions, empathy, and support all contribute to psychological and physical well-being.

• Neuroscientific measures are used to study these influences due to the limitations of self-reports and behavioral measurements.

• Neuroscientific methods have advantages and disadvantages compared to cardiovascular and endocrinological measures.

• Social stressors such as stigma, loneliness, and low social standing have a significant impact on psychological and physical well-being.

• People with low socioeconomic status are more likely to develop physical and psychological illnesses and die prematurely.

• Stigmatized groups experience higher stress levels, leading to higher morbidity and mortality.

• Repeated experiences with stigmatization sensitize the brain to detect and process cues that signal rejection.

• Loneliness is associated with greater visual cortex activation in response to social threat cues.

• Perception of social threat influences stress reactivity and sensitization to rejection.

• Social stressors may influence well-being through behaviors such as overeating, substance abuse, and risky behavior.

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• Social stressors can lead to poorer health-related decisions through negative influence on self-control processes

  • Perceived isolation is associated with decreased impulse control and lower activity in the parietal and right prefrontal cortex

  • Women who faced stereotype threat displayed reduced self-control and impaired performance on a cognitive control task

• Social stressors can influence health outcomes through their effects on healthcare interactions

  • Health care providers may have biases towards certain groups that affect their treatment of patients

  • Social categorization occurs rapidly and unintentionally, leading to differential treatment based on race or stigmatized conditions

• Social neuroscience reveals underlying processes that are not easily revealed through self-reports or behavioral assessments

  • Network and connectivity analyses have uncovered mechanisms for regulating behavior and reducing the influence of automatic responses and biases

  • Study with Chinese students in Australia showed that biases towards outgroup members decreased with longer exposure and more contact frequency with Australians

  • Recategorization did not reduce race bias in pain perception

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• Social neuroscience findings can aid in the development and testing of interventions to reduce detrimental health influences

• Anatomical overlap in activation patterns is not sufficient evidence for shared neural networks

  • Rejection and physical pain engage overlapping brain regions, but pattern classification techniques show specificity in activity patterns

  • Ongoing research is investigating interventions that affect these patterns directly or indirectly

• Neuroimaging findings are correlational and causal inferences are difficult to draw

• Social neuroscience has expanded understanding of concepts relevant to law, but lie detection is not a reliable application

  • Philosophical arguments surrounding lying and the complexity of the concept make it difficult to assess using brain imaging

  • People can subvert physiological measurement during lie detection

• Social neuroscience can contribute to legal decision-making by illuminating complex psychological constructs central to legal decision-making, such as mental state