Neural Foundations of Social Norm Compliance
Social norms like honesty and fairness play a key role in social and economic life. Without such norms, promises are not kept, contracts are not enforced, and taxes remain unpaid. Despite this importance, it is largely unknown which personal and situational factors determine our ability to comply with social norms. Here I present brain stimulation studies identifying brain processes that are biological prerequisites for social norm compliance. These studies show that the human brain contains at least two mechanisms that are necessary for fair and honest behavior. These mechanisms either enhance the sensitivity to social incentives for norm-consistent behavior or they increase the weight of moral motives associated with norm-compliant actions. The properties of these brain mechanisms have interesting implications for the possibilities and limits of interventions designed to enhance norm-compliant behavior.
主讲人简介：
Christian Ruff is the Chair Professor of Neuroeconomics and Decision Neuroscience at the University of Zurich. After undergraduate training in Freiburg/Germany and Vancouver/Canada, he completed his PhD and postdoc at University College London. His research investigates the brain mechanisms of decision making with a multi-methods approach that combines behavioral experiments and computational modelling with neuroimaging and brain stimulation. His work has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Nature Communications, Nature Reviews Neuroscience. His Google Citations is more than 6000, with a h-index of 41.
