News Release

How the brain responds to injustice

Study implicates the hormone oxytocin in maintaining fairness

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Society for Neuroscience

Justice Game

image: Trial outline of a second-party punishment game in the Justice Game. In this second-party punishment sample trial a Taker takes 100 chips from the participant and the participant can decide how much, if any, chips he wants to spend on punishment. view more 

Credit: Stallen et al., JNeurosci (2018)

Punishing a wrongdoer may be more rewarding to the brain than supporting a victim. That is one suggestion of new research published in JNeurosci, which measured the brain activity of young men while they played a "justice game."

Study participants played a game in which two players -- a "Taker" and a "Partner" -- each start out with 200 chips. The Taker can steal up to 100 of the Partner's chips, and then the Partner can retaliate by spending up to 100 chips to reduce the Taker's stash by up to 300 chips. Participants played as either a Partner or an Observer, who could either punish the Taker or help the Partner by spending chips to increase the Partner's stash.

Mirre Stallen and colleagues found that participants were more willing to punish the Taker when they experienced injustice directly as a Partner as opposed to a third-party Observer. The decision to punish was associated with activity in the ventral striatum, a brain region involved in reward processing, and distinguishable from the severity of the punishment. Before beginning the experiment, all participants were given a nasal spray, with some randomly assigned to receive the hormone oxytocin, which has been suggested to have a role in punishing. Participants in the oxytocin group chose to give more frequent, but less intense, punishments. This finding implicates oxytocin in corrective punishments akin to a "slap on the wrist" to maintain fairness.

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Article: Neurobiological Mechanisms of Responding to Injustice

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1242-17.2018

Corresponding author:

Mirre Stallen
Leiden University, The Netherlands
m.stallen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

About JNeurosci

JNeurosci, the Society for Neuroscience's first journal, was launched in 1981 as a means to communicate the findings of the highest quality neuroscience research to the growing field. Today the journal remains committed to publishing cutting-edge neuroscience that will have an immediate and lasting scientific impact while responding to authors' changing publishing needs, representing breadth of the field and diversity in authorship.

About The Society for Neuroscience

The Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest organization of scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1969, now has nearly 37,000 members in more than 90 countries and over 130 chapters worldwide.


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