The neural integration of different social motives and its impact on prosocial behavior: how egoism affects empathy and reciprocity

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All goal directed human behavior is driven by motives. With regard to prosocial behaviors, this fundamental assumption becomes complex. Prosocial behaviors can be incited by different motives such as concern for the other (altruism, triggered by empathy), concern for one’s own group (collectivism), concern for a social norm (principlism, e.g. reciprocity), or concern about one’s own welfare (for example helping to receive a reward; egoism). These different motives hardly ever operate in isolation. In most cases, different motives are activated simultaneously, and have to be integrated. To understand when and to which extent prosocial behaviours occur, it is crucial to understand how different motives are integrated, and how integrated combinations of motives affect prosocial behaviour. In the first funding period of the project, we have mainly focused on the interplay between the empathy, reciprocity and collectivistic motives. However, how the remaining motive, i.e., egoism, affects specific other prosocial motives remains poorly understood. The effect of egoism on other prosocial motives is particularly important, because the egoistic motive (triggered by incentives) is commonly used to shape individuals’ behaviors in firms or in society in general (e.g., bonus-systems). The studies that I propose for the second funding period systematically investigate the neural interplay between the egoistic motive and specific other motives, and its impact on prosocial behavior. On a conceptual level, the proposed research contributes to a model of multi-motive interactions and their impact on actual prosocial decisions. On the practical level, the finding of this project can help to optimize incentive structures.