People value health care research because it can benefit them directly but also because it can improve the well-being of others around them. Put another way, people value health care research for both selfish and altruistic reasons. Behavioral and neurobiological paradigms of decision making, coupled with brain scanning techniques, such as functional MRI, can be used to study how the brain encodes these types of values. However, to date there is little work that explores how altruistic motives are represented in neural activation. This study proposes to enrich neurobiological studies of value and decision-making by exploring the neural substrates associated with both altruistic and selfish motives for valuation.
Aim 1 : Determine behaviorally the extent to which altruistic or selfish motives explain the values people place on goods that have the potential to benefit others. By generalizing standard neurobiological decision making tasks to account for selfish and altruistic tendencies, the relative importance of these motives can be identified with rigorous statistical tests.
Aim 2 : Determine the neural mechanisms associated with both altruistic-appearing behaviors and selfish-appearing behavior to determine the extent to which these are mechanistically/neurally separable. Using functional MRI, the behavioral results from Aim 1 can be used to assess how the brain encodes both altruistic and selfish motives for valuation.
Understanding how people value health care research is important for determining whether society needs more of it so that public health can be improved. Because values for health care research can come from selfish and altruistic motives, this study seeks to better characterize the brain mechanisms associated with these two motives.
| Burghart, Daniel R; Glimcher, Paul W; Lazzaro, Stephanie C (2013) An expected utility maximizer walks into a bar… J Risk Uncertain 46: |
