Jiamiao Yang1,2 • Ruolei Gu3,4 • Jie Liu2 • Kexin Deng1 • Xiaoxuan Huang1 • Yue-Jia Luo4,5 • Fang Cui1,2
1 School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
2 Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Affective and Social Neuroscience, Magnetic Resonance Imaging Center, Center for Brain Disorders and Cognitive Sciences, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
3 CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
4 Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
5 Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China
Abstract
People as third-party observers, without direct self-interest, may punish norm violators to maintain social norms. However, third-party judgment and the follow-up punishment might be susceptible to the way we frame (i.e., verbally describe) a norm violation. We conducted a behavioral and a neuroimaging experiment to investigate the above phenomenon, which we call the ‘‘third-party framing effect’’. In these experiments, participants observed an anonymous perpetrator deciding whether to keep her/his economic benefit while exposing a victim to a risk of physical pain (described as ‘‘harming others’’ in one condition and ‘‘not helping others’’ in the other condition), then they had a chance to punish that perpetrator at their own cost. Our results showed that the participants were more willing to execute third-party punishment under the harm frame compared to the help frame, manifesting a framing effect. Self-reported anger toward perpetrators mediated the relationship between empathy toward victims and the framing effect. Meanwhile, activation of the insula mediated the relationship between mid-cingulate cortex activation and the framing effect; the functional connectivity between these regions significantly predicted the size of the framing effect. These findings shed light on the psychological and neural mechanisms of the third-party framing effect.
Keywords
Framing effect; Third-party punishment;Functional magnetic resonance imaging; Mid-cingulate cortex; Insula
