People as third-party observers,without direct self-interest,may punish norm violators to maintain social norms.However,third-party judgment and the follow-up punishment might be susceptible to the way we frame(i.e.,v...People as third-party observers,without direct self-interest,may punish norm violators to maintain social norms.However,third-party judgment and the follow-up punishment might be susceptible to the way we frame(i.e.,verbally describe)a norm violation.We conducted a behavioral and a neuroimaging experiment to investigate the above phenomenon,which we call the“third-party framing effect”.In these experiments,participants observed an anonymous perpetrator deciding whether to keep her/his economic benefit while exposing a victim to a risk of physical pain(described as“harming others”in one condition and“not helping others”in the other condition),then they had a chance to punish that perpetrator at their own cost.Our results showed that the participants were more willing to execute third-party punishment under the harm frame compared to the help frame,manifesting a framing effect.Self-reported anger toward perpetrators mediated the relationship between empathy toward victims and the framing effect.Meanwhile,activation of the insula mediated the relationship between mid-cingulate cortex activation and the framing effect;the functional connectivity between these regions significantly predicted the size of the framing effect.These findings shed light on the psychological and neural mechanisms of the third-party framing effect.展开更多
基金This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(31871109,32071083,and 31900779)Shenzhen–Hong Kong Institute of Brain Science—Shenzhen Fundamental Research Institutions(2021SHIBS0003).
文摘People as third-party observers,without direct self-interest,may punish norm violators to maintain social norms.However,third-party judgment and the follow-up punishment might be susceptible to the way we frame(i.e.,verbally describe)a norm violation.We conducted a behavioral and a neuroimaging experiment to investigate the above phenomenon,which we call the“third-party framing effect”.In these experiments,participants observed an anonymous perpetrator deciding whether to keep her/his economic benefit while exposing a victim to a risk of physical pain(described as“harming others”in one condition and“not helping others”in the other condition),then they had a chance to punish that perpetrator at their own cost.Our results showed that the participants were more willing to execute third-party punishment under the harm frame compared to the help frame,manifesting a framing effect.Self-reported anger toward perpetrators mediated the relationship between empathy toward victims and the framing effect.Meanwhile,activation of the insula mediated the relationship between mid-cingulate cortex activation and the framing effect;the functional connectivity between these regions significantly predicted the size of the framing effect.These findings shed light on the psychological and neural mechanisms of the third-party framing effect.
