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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 28, 2025

Studying Food Reward and Motivation in Humans

Studying Food Reward and Motivation in Humans

Published on: March 19, 2014

Neural Reward Representations Enable Utilitarian Welfare Maximization.

Alexander Soutschek¹, Christopher J Burke², Pyungwon Kang²

¹Department of Psychology, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich, Munich 80802, Germany alexander.soutschek@psy.lmu.de.

The Journal of Neuroscience : the Official Journal of the Society for Neuroscience

|April 15, 2024

Summary

Humans can learn and compare others' preferences to make utilitarian welfare decisions. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) in the brain represents these preferences and facilitates maximizing group welfare.

Keywords:

VMPFC multivariate analyses neural reward system social decision neuroscience utilitarianism

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Social Psychology
Decision Science

Background:

Individuals often make decisions considering the welfare of others, but comparing subjective preferences across people is challenging.
Utilitarianism proposes maximizing group welfare by summing individual utilities, yet the neural basis for this remains unclear.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate if humans can learn and represent others' preferences on a common scale for utilitarian decision-making.
To identify the neural mechanisms in the brain underlying the representation of others' preferences and utilitarian welfare.

Main Methods:

Participants learned others' preferences by observing choices.
Multivariate support vector regression was used to analyze neural activity patterns.
fMRI data was collected to examine brain activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC).

Main Results:

Participants successfully learned and represented others' preferences on a common scale.
Distributed activity patterns in the VMPFC encoded the strength of others' preferences.
The VMPFC also represented the utilitarian welfare of others, using the same neural code as preference estimation.

Conclusions:

Humans can implement utilitarian welfare maximization by learning and comparing others' preferences.
The VMPFC plays a crucial role in representing subjective preferences and enabling utilitarian decisions.
The brain repurposes reward-processing neural machinery for social welfare computations.