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Updated: Feb 12, 2026
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Combined Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation and Electroencephalography of the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex
Published on: August 17, 2018
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Inequality signals in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex inform social preference models
Lisa Holper1, Christopher J Burke2, Christoph Fausch2
1Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics, University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich, 8032 Zurich, Switzerland.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
|April 11, 2018
Summary
People dislike disadvantageous inequality, but advantageous inequality seeking varies. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activity predicts this, suggesting it encodes subjective inequality values beyond simple aversion.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Social Psychology
- Behavioral Economics
Background:
- Humans exhibit inequality aversion, preferring fairer resource distributions.
- Individual differences exist in disadvantageous inequality (DI) aversion and advantageous inequality (AI) aversion.
- Existing models explain these behaviors through payoff differences, total payoff maximization, or reciprocity.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate which theoretical models best explain dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) activity during social decision-making.
- To examine the neural basis of advantageous inequality (AI) seeking versus aversion.
- To understand the role of the dlPFC in encoding subjective values of payoff inequality.
Main Methods:
- Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure dlPFC activity.
- An anonymous norm compliance task involving fair and unfair monetary transfers.
- Behavioral analysis of acceptance/punishment decisions and response times.
- Computational modeling to compare competing theories of social preferences.
Main Results:
- All participants showed disadvantageous inequality (DI) aversion.
- Significant individual differences in advantageous inequality (AI) preferences were observed.
- dlPFC activation strongly predicted these AI preferences.
- A model incorporating AI seeking (not just aversion) best explained both behavior and dlPFC activity.
- Incorporating response times as a proxy for choice difficulty further improved model fits.
Conclusions:
- The dlPFC encodes subjective values related to payoff inequality.
- Neural representations of social preferences are richer than standard models suggest, including AI seeking.
- Findings challenge purely aversion-based models and highlight the role of AI seeking in social decision-making.
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