Aging and Altruism: Towards a Neuroeconomic Model of Age-Related Changes in Givin

衰老与利他主义：建立与年龄相关的吉文变化的神经经济模型

• 批准号: 7323938
• 负责人: ULRICH E MAYR
• 金额: $ 18.04万
• 依托单位: UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 财政年份: 2007
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2007-09-01 至 2010-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/7323938
• 关键词: Affect; Affective; Age; Aging; Altruism; Area; Behavior; Brain; Charities; Citofur; Cognitive; Condition; Data; Decision Making; Democracy; Economic Models; Economics; Elderly; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Funding; Funding Agency; Gifts; Goals; Image; Income; Individual; Lateral; Lead; Longevity; MRI Scans; Measures; Medial; Methods; Midbrain structure; Modeling; Motivation; Older Population; Participant; Persons; Population; Prefrontal Cortex; Process; Protocols documentation; Public Policy; Range; Rate; Retirement; Rewards; Sampling; Social Welfare; Societies; Taxation; Taxes; Testing; Time; Translating; Voting; Work; age difference; age group; age related; base; cognitive change; college; cost; design; desire; experience; neuroeconomics; next generation; psychologic; relating to nervous system; research study; response; theories; young adult

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In democracies, individual decisions about voluntary giving and voting determine the type and amount of public goods. Understanding the neural processes that determine these public-good decisions is important for distinguishing between economic theories, which in turn can inform public policy. Recent neuroeconomic work has provided initial evidence that charitable giving may be driven by both "pure altruism" from experiencing increases to the public good regardless of their cause (Harbaugh, Mayr, & Burghart, under review), and "warm glow" from the agency effect of having chosen to give (Moll et la., 2006). This work has also shown that both activity in neural reward centers and in prefrontal regions independently predicts rates of giving to a charity. However, these results come from experiments with predominantly young adults. In practice, the level and type of public goods are determined by the decisions of older adults, who give more and vote more often than the young do. At the same time, there are known neuro-cognitive changes that occur with age that might affect economic decisions. Therefore, our first specific aim is to generalize and extend the existing results on the neural basis of public-good decisions across a large sample of young (age 25-35, n=50) and older adults (age 65- 75, n=50). The experimental protocol will include (a) a condition in which the subjects' payoff and the funding for a public good change in a mandatory, tax-like manner, (b) a voluntary-giving condition where people can accept transfers or not, and (c) a voting condition where majority rule among a group of participants determines if taxes will be levied on all and transferred to the charity. By considering both taxation and contributions from older segments of the society, this design covers the most critical sources of funding for public good. Our second specific aim is to test hypotheses about how neural and psychological changes across the life span translate into age-related changes in public-good decisions. For example, we predict that age-related decline in the ability to represent long-term goals in prefrontal cortex reduces the tendency to voluntarily provide or vote for public goods. However, age-related increases in warm- glow should exert an opposing positive effect on charitable-giving, but not on voting for taxation since, which provides less opportunity for warm glow. In our preliminary work, we also found that the mere opportunity of free choice triggered reward-center responses, but also "neural costs" in terms of substantial prefrontal activity. Given that prefrontal activity should be particularly demanding for old adults, we predict a reduction of the free-choice benefit in old adults, a result with potentially important consequences for comparing welfare benefits of taxation and giving across age groups. In preliminary work on young adults using economic experiments and fMRI scanning we have shown that it is possible to use neural activation in reward centers as a measure of the marginal rate of substitution between payoffs to oneself and to a charity, and that this measure predicts voluntary giving decisions. We propose to apply similar methods to a population of older subjects, and to both charitable giving and voting experiments. The objective is to see if economic models can explain these behaviors in the age groups that are most likely to give and to vote, and to see how age related changes in the brain are related to the observed changes in voting and charitable giving that occur with age.

描述(由申请人提供)：在民主国家，关于自愿捐赠和投票的个人决定决定了公共产品的类型和数量。理解决定这些公共利益决策的神经过程对于区分经济理论非常重要，而经济理论反过来又可以为公共政策提供信息。最近的神经经济学研究提供了初步的证据，表明慈善捐赠可能既受到“纯粹的利他主义”的推动，无论其原因如何(Harbaugh，Mayr，&Burghart，正在审查中)，也可能受到选择捐赠的机构效应的“温暖光芒”(Moll et la.，2006)。这项研究还表明，神经奖励中心和前额叶区域的活动都独立地预测了慈善机构的捐赠率。然而，这些结果来自以年轻人为主的实验。在实践中，公共产品的水平和类型由老年人的决定决定，他们比年轻人捐赠更多，投票更频繁。与此同时，已知的随着年龄增长而发生的神经认知变化可能会影响经济决策。 因此，我们的第一个具体目标是在年轻人(25-35岁，n=50)和老年人(65-75岁，n=50)的大样本中推广和扩展基于神经基础的公共利益决策的现有结果。实验协议将包括(A)受试者的报酬和公益资金以强制性的、类似税收的方式改变的条件，(B)人们可以接受转移或不接受转移的自愿捐赠条件，以及(C)一组参与者的多数规则决定是否对所有人征税并转移到慈善机构的投票条件。通过考虑税收和来自社会老年阶层的贡献，这一设计涵盖了公益事业最关键的资金来源。 我们的第二个具体目标是测试关于一生中神经和心理变化如何转化为公共利益决策中与年龄相关的变化的假设。例如，我们预测，随着年龄的增长，前额叶皮质代表长期目标的能力下降，降低了自愿提供或投票支持公共产品的倾向。然而，与年龄相关的温暖发光的增加应该对慈善捐赠产生相反的积极影响，但不会对投票支持税收产生积极影响，因为这提供了较少的温暖发光机会。在我们的初步工作中，我们还发现，仅仅是自由选择的机会就会触发奖励中心的反应，但也会在大量的前额叶活动方面产生“神经成本”。鉴于前额叶活动对老年人的要求特别高，我们预测老年人的自由选择福利将减少，这一结果可能会产生重要的后果，即比较不同年龄段的税收和捐赠的福利。 在使用经济实验和fMRI扫描对年轻人进行的初步工作中，我们已经表明，可以使用奖励中心的神经激活作为对自己和对慈善机构的回报之间的边际替代率的衡量标准，并且这一衡量标准可以预测自愿捐赠决定。我们建议将类似的方法应用于年龄较大的受试者群体，以及慈善捐赠和投票实验。我们的目标是看经济模型是否能解释最有可能捐赠和投票的年龄段的这些行为，以及大脑中与年龄相关的变化如何与观察到的投票和慈善捐赠随年龄发生的变化有关。