Prosocial decision-making under time pressure: Behavioral and neural mechanisms

The present study employed a novel paradigm and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to uncover the specific regulatory mechanism of time pressure and empathy trait in prosocial decision-making, compared to self-decision making. Participants were instructed to decide whether to spend their own monetary interest to alleviate themselves (or another person) from unpleasant noise threats under high and low time pressures. On the behavioral level, results showed that high time pressure had a significant effect on reducing participants' willingness to spend money on relieving themselves from the noise, while there is a similar but not significant trend in prosocial decision-making. On the neural level, for self-concerned decision-making, low time pressure activated the bilateral insula more strongly than high time pressure. For prosocial decision-making, high time pressure suppressed activations in multiple brain regions related to empathy (temporal pole, middle temporal gyrus, and inferior frontal gyrus), valuation (medial orbitofrontal cortex), and emotion (putamen). The functional connectivity strength among these regions, especially the connectivity between the medial orbitofrontal cortex and putamen, significantly predicted the effect of time pressure on prosocial decision-making at the behavioral level. Additionally, we discovered the activation of the medial orbitofrontal cortex partially mediated the effect of empathy trait scores on prosocial decision-making. These findings suggest that (1) there are different neural underpinnings for the modulation of time pressure for self and prosocial decision-making, and (2) the empathy trait plays a crucial role in the latter.