The Neurocomputational Mechanism Underlying Decision-Making on Unfairness to Self and Others

Fairness is a fundamental value in human societies,with individuals concerned about unfairness both to themselves and to others.Nevertheless,an enduring debate focuses on whether self-unfairness and other-unfairness elicit shared or distinct neuropsychological processes.To address this,we combined a three-person ultimatum game with computational modeling and advanced neuroimaging analysis techniques to unravel the behavioral,cognitive,and neural patterns underlying unfairness to self and others.Our behavioral and computational results reveal a heightened concern among participants for self-unfairness over other-unfairness.Moreover,self-unfairness consistently activates brain regions such as the anterior insula,dorsal anterior cingulate cortex,and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,spanning various spatial scales that encompass univariate activation,local multivariate patterns,and whole-brain multivariate patterns.These regions are well-established in their association with emotional and cognitive processes Lanxin Luo and Han Xu contributed equally to this work.Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-024-01245-8.Yue-JiaLuo luoyj@bnu.edu.cn Chunliang Feng chunliang.feng@m.scnu.edu.cn 1 Key Laboratory of Brain,Cognition and Education Sciences(South China Normal University),Ministry of Education,Guangzhou 510631,China 2 School of Psychology,South China Normal University,Guangzhou 510631,China 3 Center for Studies of Psychological Application,South China Normal University,Guangzhou 510631,China relevant to fairness-based decision-making.Conversely,other-unfairness primarily engages the middle occipital gyrus.Collectively,our findings robustly support distinct neurocomputational signatures between self-unfairness and other-unfairness.