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: 7482270
• 负责人: ULRICH E MAYR
• 金额: $ 17.65万
• 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/7482270
• 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.

在民主国家，个人关于自愿捐赠和投票的决定决定了公共产品的类型和数量。了解决定这些公共产品决策的神经过程对于区分经济理论非常重要，而这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证据，表明慈善捐赠可能是由“纯粹的利他主义”驱动的，因为无论其原因如何，慈善捐赠都会增加公共利益（Harbaugh，Mayr和Burghart，正在审查），以及来自选择捐赠的代理效应的“温暖的光芒”（Moll等人，2006年）。这项研究还表明，神经奖励中心和前额叶区域的活动都能独立预测慈善捐赠的比例。然而，这些结果来自主要是年轻人的实验。在实践中，公益物的水平和类型是由老年人的决定决定的，老年人比年轻人给予更多，投票更多。与此同时，随着年龄的增长，神经认知也会发生变化，这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（年龄25-35岁，n=50）和老年人（年龄65- 75岁，n=50）的大样本中推广和扩展公共利益决策的神经基础上的现有结果。实验方案将包括：（a）一个条件，在这个条件下，受试者的收益和公共产品的资金以强制性的、类似税收的方式变化;（B）一个自愿捐赠条件，人们可以接受或不接受转移;以及（c）一个投票条件，在这个条件下，一组参与者中的多数规则决定是否对所有人征税并将其转移到慈善机构。通过考虑税收和社会老年人的缴款，这一设计涵盖了公益最关键的资金来源。 我们的第二个具体目标是检验关于整个生命周期的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，与年龄相关的前额叶皮层代表长期目标的能力下降会降低自愿提供或投票支持公共产品的倾向。然而，与年龄相关的暖光增加应该对慈善捐赠产生相反的积极影响，但不会对税收投票产生积极影响，因为这提供了更少的暖光机会。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引发奖励中心的反应，但也会引发大量前额叶活动的“神经成本”。考虑到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会减少，这一结果可能对比较税收和不同年龄组的福利产生重要影响。 在对年轻人进行的初步研究中，我们使用了经济学实验和功能磁共振成像（fMRI）扫描，结果表明，可以用奖励中心的神经激活来衡量自己和慈善机构的回报之间的边际替代率，并且这个指标可以预测自愿捐赠的决定。我们建议将类似的方法应用于老年受试者群体，以及慈善捐赠和投票实验。我们的目标是看看经济模型是否可以解释最有可能给予和投票的年龄组中的这些行为，并看看大脑中与年龄相关的变化如何与观察到的随着年龄发生的投票和慈善捐赠的变化相关。