Charitable giving depends on individuals' abilities to make altruistic decisions. Previous studies suggest that altruism involves recruitment of neural resources in regions including social processing, reward/reinforcement learning, emotional response, and cognition. Despite evolutionary and social benefits to altruism, we know that humans do not always engage in altruistic behavior, like charitable giving. Understanding the underlying processes leading to decisions to donate is vital to improve prosocial community engagement. The present study examined how characteristics of the charitable giving opportunity influence an individual's decision to give and the neural engagement underlying these features. Twenty-nine participants subjectively rated ten charities on their value, effectiveness, and the subject's personal chance of donating. Participants then completed an fMRI task requiring them to decide to donate to certain charities given the probability of the donation helping, their personal preference for the charity, and whether the donation came at cost to themselves. There was a significant reduction in donating when the probability of helping was low versus high, and subjects were significantly less likely to donate to their lowest-rated charities. Further, probability of a donation being helpful and how much the subject favored a charity moderated PCC and left IFG engagement. Interestingly, reward neurocircuitry did not demonstrate similar sensitivity to these variations. These results may suggest individuals engage motivated reasoning to justify failure to donate, while donations are driven by emotion mentalizing that focuses on the welfare of others. This may provide valuable insight into how to engage individuals in altruistic giving.

慈善捐赠取决于个人做出利他决定的能力。先前的研究表明，利他主义涉及在社会处理、奖励/强化学习、情绪反应和认知等区域招募神经资源。尽管利他主义具有进化和社会效益，但我们知道人类并不总是从事利他行为，例如慈善捐赠。了解导致捐赠决定的潜在过程对于改善亲社会社区参与至关重要。本研究考察了慈善捐赠机会的特征如何影响个人的捐赠决定以及这些特征背后的神经参与。29 名参与者主观评价了 10 个慈善机构的价值、有效性和受试者的个人捐赠机会。参与者然后完成了一项 fMRI 任务，要求他们根据捐赠帮助的可能性、他们对慈善机构的个人偏好以及捐赠是否以自己为代价来决定向某些慈善机构捐赠。当帮助的可能性较低与较高时，捐赠会显着减少，并且受试者向评级最低的慈善机构捐款的可能性显着降低。此外，捐赠有帮助的可能性以及受试者对慈善机构的偏爱程度调节了 PCC 并离开了 IFG 参与。有趣的是，奖励神经回路对这些变化没有表现出类似的敏感性。这些结果可能表明个人进行动机推理来证明不捐赠是合理的，而捐赠是由关注他人福利的情绪心理化驱动的。