Humans differ in their preferences for personal rewards, fairness and others’ welfare. Such social preferences predict trust, public goods provision and mutual gains bargaining and have been linked to neural activity in regions involved in reward computation, cognitive control and perspective-taking. Although shaped by culture, social preferences are relatively stable across time, raising the question whether differences in brain anatomy predict social preferences and their key components—concern for personal outcomes and concern for others’ outcomes. Here, we examine this possibility by linking social preferences measured with incentivized economic games to 74 cortical parcels in 194 healthy humans. Neither concerns for personal outcomes nor concerns for the outcomes of others in isolation were related to anatomical differences. However, fitting earlier findings, social preferences positively scaled with cortical thickness in the left olfactory sulcus, a structure in the orbital frontal cortex previously shown to be involved in value-based decision-making. Consistent with work showing that heavier usage corresponds to larger brain volume, findings suggest that pro-social preferences relate to cortical thickness in the left olfactory sulcus because of heavier reliance on the orbital frontal cortex during social decision-making.

中文翻译：

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社会偏好与眶额皮质的皮质厚度相关

人类对个人奖励、公平和他人福利的偏好不同。这种社会偏好可以预测信任、公共产品供应和互利讨价还价，并且与涉及奖励计算、认知控制和观点采择的区域的神经活动有关。尽管受到文化的影响，但社会偏好随着时间的推移相对稳定，这引发了一个问题，即大脑解剖结构的差异是否可以预测社会偏好及其关键组成部分——对个人结果的关注和对他人结果的关注。在这里，我们通过将用激励性经济游戏衡量的社会偏好与 194 名健康人的 74 个皮层包裹联系起来来检验这种可能性。对个人结果的关注和对孤立他人结果的关注都与解剖学差异无关。然而，与早期的研究结果相吻合，社会偏好与左侧嗅沟的皮层厚度成正比，左侧嗅沟中的一种结构先前被证明与基于价值的决策有关。与表明使用量越大脑容量越大的工作一致，研究结果表明，亲社会偏好与左侧嗅沟的皮质厚度有关，因为在社会决策过程中更依赖于眶额皮质。