Disclosing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding

Abstract

Humans devote 30-40% of speech output solely to informing others of their own subjective experiences. What drives this propensity for disclosure? Here, we test recent theories that individuals place high subjective value on opportunities to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others and that doing so engages neural and cognitive mechanisms associated with reward. Five studies provided support for this hypothesis. Self-disclosure was strongly associated with increased activation in brain regions that form the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the nucleus accumbens and ventral tegmental area. Moreover, individuals were willing to forgo money to disclose about the self. Two additional studies demonstrated that these effects stemmed from the independent value that individuals placed on self-referential thought and on simply sharing information with others. Together, these findings suggest that the human tendency to convey information about personal experience may arise from the intrinsic value associated with self-disclosure.self-reference | social cognition | reward | functional MRI S tudies of human conversation have documented that 30-40% of everyday speech is used to relay information to others about one's private experiences or personal relationships (1-4), and recent surveys of Internet use indicate that upwards of 80% of posts to social media sites (such as Twitter) consist simply of announcements about one's own immediate experiences (5). Although other primates do not generally attempt to communicate to others what they know-for example, by pointing out interesting things or modeling behaviors for others to imitateby 9 mo of age, human children begin trying to draw others' attention to aspects of the environment that they find important (6), and adults in all societies make consistent attempts to impart their knowledge to others (7). Recently, a number of commentators have argued that such unusually high rates of disclosure derive from a species-specific motivation to share one's beliefs and knowledge about the world (6, 7), suggesting that our species may have an intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others. This account suggests the following hypothesis: To the extent that humans are motivated to propagate the products of their minds, opportunities to disclose one's thoughts should be experienced as a powerful form of subjective reward. Here, across five studies, we used a combination of neuroimaging and cognitive methods to demonstrate empirical support for this possibility.Over the past two decades, researchers have characterized a system of neural regions that responds to the anticipation and receipt of reward (8-11). In both humans and animals, the mesolimbic dopamine system-which includes the nucleus accumbens (NAcc) and the ventral tegmental area (VTA)-responds robustly to primary rewards such as food (12-15); secondary rewards such as money or other tokens that can be exchanged for primary rewards (16-22); and even social rewards such as learning that others share one's opinion, experi...

Neural mechanisms tracking popularity in real-world social networks

“…2B). The activation peaks we found are consistent with previous neuroimaging studies using the MID (30)(31)(32)34) …”

“…For our primary analysis, we first needed to independently localize regions-of-interest (ROIs) related to affective valuation and social cognition. Following the established analytic approach of previous neuroimaging studies, the monetary incentive delay (MID) task (30) was used to independently localize regions active during anticipation and receipt of monetary rewards (31,32). The social cognition system localizer was a well-validated person judgment task (33) commonly used to identify regions involved in thinking about others' mental states and traits, here adapted such that perceivers made judgments about target group members and predicted targets' judgments of them.…”

Crowd-powered positive psychological interventions

“…Fortunately, modern crowdsourcing techniques can produce results within a few minutes or even seconds (Bernstein, Brandt, Miller, & Karger, 2011). Lastly, sharing information about the self is intrinsically rewarding (Tamir & Mitchell, 2012) and a crowd-powered system that offers social sharing opportunities could be especially alluring.…”

Neuroteisė: Keletas Fundamentalių Įžvalgų Apie Teisminių Sprendimų Priėmimą

“…Teisėjai yra aktyvūs klausytojai. Jei teisėjas yra išblaškomas, tikėtina, kad tam tikrų dalykų jis neišgirs 86 sprendimus. Teisėjai, patiriantys nuolatinį kognityvų nuovargį, dažniau priima intuityvius sprendimus.…”