Behavioral motives and neural mechanisms of social information process and social communication using fMRI and computational models

Abstract

Gossip, the transmission of social information about an absent person, is a ubiquitous social interaction frequently found in our daily lives. Even though gossip is generally considered malicious behavior that violates others’ privacy without permission, many researchers have suggested, with evidence, that gossip is motivated by prosocial means to maintain the society of proper rules and orders. Although gossip is a clear example of decision-making that involves sophisticated estimation of benefits (e.g., punishing norm-violating and promoting norm-conforming behavior) and costs (e.g., risk of breaking the solidarity norm of the group), the number of existing literatures on gossip from the point of view of value-based decision making is limited. Among them, studies that provide empirical evidence through experiments are even rarer. Here, we investigated what motivates people to instigate gossip in various social contexts through three separate studies. First, we conducted a behavioral study to find possible benefits and costs of gossip. To do that, we systematically generated gossip scenarios containing various levels of benefits and costs based on three fundamental building blocks of social information: target (i.e., who did it?), content (i.e., what did they do?), and valence (i.e., was the event good or bad?). Then, we tried to find if the differences in benefits and costs of gossip influence spreading behavior. With the data obtained from 102 participants, we found that gossip with high costs (i.e., information that may cause serious adverse outcomes or social conflicts after sharing without the target’s permission) was spread significantly less than gossip with relatively low costs (and therefore relatively high expected total benefits). Specifically, gossip with strong moral contents (e.g., about cheating or harming others) was spread at high rates regardless of the target, suggesting information about social norms and rules is beneficial to share within any context. On the other hand, spreading rates of gossip about personality or daily social events were influenced mainly by the traits of targets, such as their relationship with the sender and their social influence level. Next, we conducted a brain imaging study to find neural evidence of such benefit-cost estimation we found behaviorally. From the data collected from 45 participants, we found involvement of DMPFC in costly gossip processing and VMPFC in ‘spreading vs. not’ decision. Throughout the current study, we were able to suggest, with both behavioral and neural evidence, that gossip decision is made via a sophisticated benefit-cost valuation process. In addition, we successfully proposed the new idea for gossip decision structure through computational modeling.