ESRC neuroscience grant

Economists and neuroscientists have recently made major steps forward in the investigation of the brain processes underlying cooperative behaviour. In general, they have focused on tasks where subjects face a dilemma between individual and collective gain. A number of brain imaging studies have shown how decision making in these situations can be conceived of as a competition between different brain regions that respond to immediate gratification / reward, the pain of social rejection as well as more rational, unemotional reasoning. While the "cooperative games" studied to date are of great interest, they account for a relatively small part of everyday social interactions. Our social life in fact consists mostly of coordination problems, where we must converge on choices and strategies that will benefit all parties involved (driving on the left of the road, working during the day rather than at night, even speaking the same language, are all solutions to coordination problems of this kind). When a solution becomes widely and repeatedly adopted, it becomes a "social convention" or norm in a certain group or population. In this project we propose to carry out the first investigation of the neural basis of the emergence and consolidation of conventions. In particular, we are interested in finding whether (and if so, how) conventions have the tendency to evolve into norms that individuals prefer not to breach. Several economists and philosophers (from David Hume to Friedrich Hayek) have proposed functional explanations that would explain this fact, but so far we have no idea of what sort of causal process may underlie such phenomenon. We hypothesise that as conventions become repeated the "social pain" associated with breaching them increases to the point where it can outway possible benefits to the individual associated with breaking these social rules. We will test this idea by measuring brain activity using the technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging while volunteers play a simple coordination game. We expect to see differences in brain regions which have previously been shown to respond to rewards and social disgust, dependent upon the extent to which conventions have become established over multiple rounds of the game.