Collaborative Research: From Brains to Society: Neural Underpinnings of Collective Behaviors Via Massive Data and Experiments

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Despite thousands of investigations on the neural basis of individual behaviors and even more studies on collective behaviors, a clear bridge between the organization of individual brains and their combinational impact on group behaviors, such as cooperation and conflict and ultimately collective action, is lacking. To address the grand challenge of inferring group cooperation from the functional neuroarchitecture of individual brains, this project will harness advances in data, experiment and computation. Specifically, it will integrate, for the first time, existing large-scale human functional neuroimaging data, prospectively collected individual and group behavioral data from a large cohort, with cutting-edge machine learning tools, hierarchical models and large-scale simulations. This is a collaborative effort between a team of neuroscientists, social scientists and data scientists, that aims to elucidate the neural basis of cooperation, a fundamental process in a functioning society and at the core of social environments. The project will first harness the combined wealth of existing neuroimaging and behavioral data from large-scale studies, including the Human Connectome-Lifespan (HCP-L) and the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) and will leverage recent breakthroughs in machine learning to characterize the diversity, individuality and commonality of neural circuits (the connectome) supporting cognitive function across the lifespan. It will then conduct large-scale (~10,000 individuals) online behavioral experiments to identify connections between individual behaviors, decisions and group behaviors during a Public Goods Game. The experiments will measure individual proclivity towards cooperation and the social welfare obtained by cooperation, leading to potentially transformative insights into the emergence of cooperation within groups via individual behaviors. The resulting first-of-its-kind dataset may become a very valuable resource to the research community. Large-scale simulations based on statistical models estimated from this and the assembled neuroimaging datasets will then assess the direct or indirect relationships between individual connectomes and cooperation in group settings, and will elucidate the role of group processes in amplifying or ameliorating individual differences towards collective outcomes. Findings from this project may have a transformative impact on the scientific community's currently incomplete understanding of how individual brains shape societal behavior via cognitive, social, and interactive mechanisms.This project is part of the National Science Foundation's Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea activity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.