Social Decision Preferences for Close Others Are Embedded in Neural and Linguistic Representations

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Social Psychology
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Individuals possess stable social decision-making preferences and nuanced mental representations of close others.
• The precise influence of these mental representations on social decision-making remains underexplored.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the relationship between neural and linguistic representations of close others and social decision-making.
• To determine how brain activity and language use predict choices involving parents and friends.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and natural language processing (NLP) were employed.
• Participants (N=63) underwent fMRI while making social decisions involving nominated parents and friends.
• Linguistic analysis of written descriptions from an independent sample (N=1,641) was conducted.

Main Results:

• Neural representations of parents and friends, relative to the self, correlated with social decision preferences.
• Self-parent neural similarity in specific brain regions predicted parent preference; self-friend similarity predicted friend preference.
• Semantic features from written descriptions reliably predicted social decision preferences, with high neural-linguistic correspondence.

Conclusions:

• Mental representations, both neural and linguistic, play a critical role in guiding social decisions involving familiar individuals.
• This study elucidates the underlying neural and linguistic mechanisms of social decision-making.
• Findings highlight the importance of understanding how internal representations shape interpersonal choices.