CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 462Experimental Behavioral Economics StudiesNeural and Behavioral Psychology StudiesDecision-Making and Behavioral Economics

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 39 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Neural evidence for inequality-averse social preferences

Tricomi, Elizabeth, Rangel, Antonio, Camerer, Colin F., O’Doherty, John P.·2010·Nature
DOI 10.1038/nature08785
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

A popular hypothesis in the social sciences is that humans have social preferences to reduce inequality in outcome distributions because it has a negative impact on their experienced reward. Although there is a large body of behavioural and anthropological evidence consistent with the predictions of these theories, there is no direct neural evidence for the existence of inequality-averse preferences. Such evidence would be especially useful because some behaviours that are consistent with a dislike for unequal outcomes could also be explained by concerns for social image or reciprocity, which do not require a direct aversion towards inequality. Here we use functional MRI to test directly for the existence of inequality-averse social preferences in the human brain. Inequality was created by recruiting pairs of subjects and giving one of them a large monetary endowment. While both subjects evaluated further monetary transfers from the experimenter to themselves and to the other participant, we measured neural responses in the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, two areas that have been shown to be involved in the valuation of monetary and primary rewards in both social and non-social contexts. Consistent with inequality-averse models of social preferences, we find that activity in these areas was more responsive to transfers to others than to self in the 'high-pay' subject, whereas the activity of the 'low-pay' subject showed the opposite pattern. These results provide direct evidence for the validity of this class of models, and also show that the brain's reward circuitry is sensitive to both advantageous and disadvantageous inequality.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/nature08785

Cites

39 of 39 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 40 references

1 of the 40 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. Costa, P. T. & McCrae, R. R. Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) Professional Manual (Psychological Assessment Resources, Inc., 1992)

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Items 301–400 of 451

Related

See all

Metadata

Authors
Tricomi, E., Rangel, A., Camerer, C. F., & O’Doherty, J. P.
Affiliations
  • Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (US)
  • California Institute of Technology (US)
Corresponding author
O’Doherty, John P.
ORCID
Venue
Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2010-02
Volume
463
Issue
7284
Pages
1089-1091
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
DOI
10.1038/nature08785
OpenAlex
W1975125955
Cited by
462
References
40
Citations by year
2026: 15 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 17 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 25 · 2020: 29 · 2019: 37 · 2018: 24 · 2017: 25 · 2016: 23 · 2015: 35 · 2014: 38 · 2013: 42 · 2012: 37
FWCI
105.24
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
Locations
  • Nature (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
Keywords
distributive fairness, inequality aversion, reward systems, ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, monetary transfers, social preferences, reciprocity, social image
MeSH terms
Basal Ganglia, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Models, Neurological, Reward, Role Playing, Social Behavior, Social Justice, Reproducibility of Results, Prefrontal Cortex, Beneficence, Young Adult

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review