Norihiro Sadato of the National Institute for Physiological Sciences (NIPS), Aichi, Japan, and colleagues found that making money and making a reputation engage much of the same reward circuitry in the brain – a finding that they say yields insight into what drives complex social behaviors.

“By directly contrasting the brain activities of the same subjects in relation to the delivery of social and monetary rewards, our results clearly show that social approval shares the same neural basis as monetary rewards, thus providing strong support for the idea of a ‘common neural currency’ of reward,” concluded the researchers.

They wrote that their findings “indicate that the social reward of a good reputation should be incorporated into the neural model of human decision making in a similar manner to monetary rewards.” Thus, they wrote, experiments on decision making that use money-related games need to take into account that the subjects are exchanging more than money; they are also dealing in approval and reputation. Read the rest of this entry »