Group environment modulates how third parties assess unfairly shared losses and unfairly shared gains: neural signatures from ERPs and EEG oscillations

ABSTRACT

Introduction

Through its long-term evolution and development, human society has gradually formed stable and effective norms to maintain normal social production and social activities. Altruistic punishment is indispensable in maintaining social norms. Altruistic punishment includes second-party and third-party punishment, and third-party punishment refers to punishing violators by unbiased bystanders who have not suffered damage to their interests. Cooperation is an important form of human social interaction. Third parties play an essential role in maintaining social cooperation. Third parties’ behaviors in maintaining cooperative norms may be related to their social environment.

Method

We used the prisoner’s dilemma (PD) game and distinguished between the gain and loss contexts of the economy to explore how the group environment modulates the cognitive neural mechanisms and psychological processing of the third-party punishment decision. Twenty-six college students (M_age = 19.88 ± 1.58) participated in the experiment; data from four participants were excluded from analyses of the EEG data due to large artifacts.

Results

The behavioral results show that the degree of punishment from the third party in a loss context was greater than in a gain context. ERP analysis results show that the third party applied a lower P300 in the loss context. The loss context induced a greater N100 than the gain context in the individual environment. At the same time, alpha-band power activated by the individual environment was greater than that activated by the group environment under the gain context.

Conclusion

These results suggest that a third party maintaining the norms of social cooperation in different contexts will adjust punishment decisions according to the environment, and this process is mainly dominated by the negative emotions caused by environment.

KEYWORDS:

• Third-party punishment
• cooperation
• loss context
• Erps
• time-frequency analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data supporting this study’s findings are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were by the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards (Institution: Ethics Committee of North China University of Science and Technology, ID:2021019). This article does not refer to any studies conducted with animals.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Hebei Province education science planning-General funded project. “The moderation of altruistic punishment by social environmental factors and its educational implications”. (2203198); The key research project of North China University of Science and Technology (ZD-RW-202319) National education science planning-Youth project of The Ministry of Education. ‘The influence of social moral factors on pain empathy and its educational implications’. (EBA210396).