Self-Control in Social Decision Making: A Neurobiological Perspective

Abstract

Self-control is defined as the process in which thoughts, emotions, or prepotent responses are inhibited to efficiently enact a more focal goal. Self-control not only allows for more adaptive individual decision making but also promotes adaptive social decision making. In this chapter, we examine a burgeoning area of interdisciplinary research: the neuroscience of self-control in social decision making. We examine research on self-control in complex social contexts examined from a social neuroscience perspective. We review correlational evidence from neuroimaging studies and causal evidence from neuromodulation studies (i.e., brain stimulation). We specifically highlight research that shows that self-control involves the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) across a number of social domains and behaviors. Research has also begun to directly integrate nonsocial with social forms of self-control, showing that the basic neurobiological processes involved in stopping a motor response appear to be involved in social contexts that require self-control. Further, neural traits, such as baseline activation in the lateral PFC, can explain sources of individual differences in self-control capacity. We explore whether techniques that change brain functioning could target neural mechanisms related to self-control capacity to potentially enhance self-control in social behavior. Finally, we discuss several research questions ripe for examination. We broadly suggest that future research can now turn to exploring how neural traits and situational affordances interact to impact self-control in social decision making in order to continue to elucidate the processes that allow people to maintain and realize stable goals in a dynamic and often uncertain social environment.

Conclusion

Historically, the study of self-control has been most heavily researched in nonsocial domains, including motor-response inhibition, memory and thought suppression, and emotion regulation (Aron and Poldrack 2005; Cohen and Lieberman 2010). Yet, social dilemmas confront us daily and self-control is critically involved in deciding between options that benefit ourselves and options that benefit others. In this chapter, we reported research in which neuroscience methods combined with social interaction paradigms reveal the neural mechanisms of self-control in social contexts. Moreover, it was revealed that self-control in social decision making reliably involves the lateral PFC, the same region involved in a host of other nonsocial forms of control. Such research highlights the potential for making long-lasting changes to lateral PFC structure and function, which could in turn change self-control capacity and help researchers better understand predispositions toward self-control problems in social conduct. Future research can turn to researching how individual differences and situational affordances interact to impact self-control in social decision making.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by grants from the Swiss National Science Foundation (Daria Knoch, PP00P1-123381) and from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Kyle Nash). We would like to thank Lorena Gianotti and Thomas Baumgartner for helpful comments.