Abstract
Women are known to have stronger prosocial preferences than men, but it remains an open question as to how these behavioural differences arise from differences in brain functioning. Here, we provide a neurobiological account for the hypothesized gender difference. In a pharmacological study and an independent neuroimaging study, we tested the hypothesis that the neural reward system encodes the value of sharing money with others more strongly in women than in men. In the pharmacological study, we reduced receptor type-specific actions of dopamine, a neurotransmitter related to reward processing, which resulted in more selfish decisions in women and more prosocial decisions in men. Converging findings from an independent neuroimaging study revealed gender-related activity in neural reward circuits during prosocial decisions. Thus, the neural reward system appears to be more sensitive to prosocial rewards in women than in men, providing a neurobiological account for why women often behave more prosocially than men.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank L. Horvath and K. Treiber for help with data collection. This work was supported by grants PP00P1_128574, PP00P1_150739, 00014_165884, CRSII3_141965 (PNT) and 320030_143443 (ARB; PIs: C. Ruff and T. Hare) from the Swiss National Science Foundation, a research credit of the University of Zurich to C.J.B. (FK-16-016) and a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship PIIF-GA-2012-327196 to A.R.B. All funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
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A.S., C.J.B., A.R.B., S.C.W., B.W., T.K. and P.N.T. designed the study. A.S., C.J.B., A.R.B., R.S., J.t.V. and H.H. performed the research. A.S., C.J.B. and I.I.K. analysed the data. A.S. and P.N.T. wrote the manuscript. C.J.B., A.R.B., R.S., S.C.W., I.I.K., J.t.V., H.H., B.W. and T.K. edited and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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Soutschek, A., Burke, C.J., Raja Beharelle, A. et al. The dopaminergic reward system underpins gender differences in social preferences. Nat Hum Behav 1, 819–827 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0226-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0226-y
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