Abstract
Receiving help or a favor from another person can sometimes have a hidden cost. In this study, we explore these hidden costs by developing and validating a theoretical model of indebtedness across three studies that combine a large-scale online questionnaire, interpersonal games, computational modeling, and neuroimaging. Our model captures how individuals perceive the altruistic and strategic intentions of the benefactor. These perceptions produce distinct feelings of guilt and obligation that together comprise indebtedness and motivate reciprocity. Perceived altruistic intentions convey care and concern and are associated with activity in the insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, while perceived strategic intentions convey expectations of future reciprocity and are associated with activation in the temporal parietal junction and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. We further develop a neural utility model of indebtedness using multivariate patterns of brain activity that captures the tradeoff between these feelings and reliably predicts reciprocity behavior.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
