The Effect Of Social Evaluation Threats On Cooperation Behavior In Social Dilemmas

Cooperative behavior in social dilemmas is one of the foundations of human subsistence.It is a decision-making behavior that sacrifices personal interests for collective interests after the conflicts between collective interests and personal interests.In social activities,people inevitably receive feedback from others,and the threats of social evaluation refers to a negative social evaluation.We explored the influence of social evaluation threats on social dilemma cooperation behavior,using prisoner's dilemma task,with task-functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging(task-fMRI)and Resting-State functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging(RS-f MRI)technology.In this study,subjects were randomly divided into a threat group and a non-threat group.The social evaluation of the threat group was positive,and the social evaluation of the non-threat group was negative.After receiving the social evaluation,the two groups of subjects would completed the prisoner's dilemma task.Results are as follows:(1)the behavior results showed that the cooperation rates of the threat and non-threat group had no significant difference when they receive social evaluation firstly.The effect of the social evaluative threats embodied in the threat group whose cooperation rate decreased significantly when they received the social evaluation threats again,while the cooperation rates of the non-threat group did not change significantly.In addition,the subjects' altruistic Pro-social tendencies were linearly related to the cooperative behavior under non-threat conditions,but there was no significant correlation in the threat group.(2)the neural results showed that in the task-f MRI,the threat groups need more dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to participate in the modulation of cooperative behavior.Compared with the non-threat group,the threat group had a stronger dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation after receiving the threats of social evaluation again.On the other hand,the study found that the Re Ho values and ALFF values of the right orbitalfrontal cortex in the threat group were negatively correlated with the cooperation rates,and the ALFF values of the bilateral striatum was negatively correlated with the cooperation rates.In conclusion,we found the threats of social evaluation would influence the cooperation behavior of individuals in social dilemmas.With the increase of threats,the cooperation rate will decrease significantly.The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex participated in the modulation.On the other hand,The Re Ho values and ALFF values of the orbitalfrontal cortex and the ALFF values of the bilateral striatum were related to the cooperation rates in the social dilemmas after the social evaluation threats.