SAP Seminar, Dr Patricia Lockwood

Neurocomputational mechanisms of selfishness and prosociality

Dr Patricia Lockwood, University of Oxford

The question of whether humans are fundamentally selfish or prosocial has intrigued many disciplines from philosophy to economics for centuries. From small acts of kindness to major sacrifices, just how willing are humans to help others? Here I will describe a set of experiments that use computational modelling approaches derived from theoretical frameworks of effort-based decision making and associative learning to understand human selfishness and prosociality. I will describe how social computations are reflected in anatomically distinct portions of the medial prefrontal cortex, and the individual differences that may drive variability between people. I will show that in general, people care more about their own outcomes and possessions than others, but that there are substantial individual differences that are linked to specific brain areas. These findings could have important implications for understanding everyday social decision-making and its disruption in disorders of social behaviour such as apathy and psychopathy.