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Humans Use Future Thinking to Exert Social Control

Soojung Na, Dongil Chung, Andreas Hula, Jennifer Jung, Vincenzo G. Fiore, Peter Dayan, Xiaosi Gu
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/737353
Soojung Na
1The Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
2Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
3Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Dongil Chung
4Department of Human Factors Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology
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Andreas Hula
5Austrian Institute of Technology
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Jennifer Jung
6School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, The University of Texas at Dallas
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Vincenzo G. Fiore
2Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
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Peter Dayan
7Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
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Xiaosi Gu
2Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
3Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
8James J. Peter Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Bronx, NY
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  • For correspondence: xiaosi.gu@mssm.edu
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Abstract

Social controllability, the ability to exert control over others, is critical in social interactions yet uninvestigated. Here, we used functional neuroimaging and a social exchange paradigm in which people’s current choices either did, or did not, influence their partners’ proposals in the future. Computational modeling revealed that participants used future-oriented thinking and calculated the downstream effects of their current actions regardless of the controllability of the social environment. Furthermore, greater levels of estimated control correlated with better performance in controllable interactions and less illusory beliefs about control in uncontrollable interactions. Neural instantiation of trial-by-trial values of social controllability were tracked in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), striatum, and insula for controllable interactions, but only in vmPFC for uncontrollable interactions. These findings demonstrate that humans use future-oriented thinking, a strategy similar to model-based planning, to guide social choices; and that subjective beliefs about social controllability might not be grounded in reality.

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Posted August 16, 2019.
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Humans Use Future Thinking to Exert Social Control
Soojung Na, Dongil Chung, Andreas Hula, Jennifer Jung, Vincenzo G. Fiore, Peter Dayan, Xiaosi Gu
bioRxiv 737353; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/737353
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Humans Use Future Thinking to Exert Social Control
Soojung Na, Dongil Chung, Andreas Hula, Jennifer Jung, Vincenzo G. Fiore, Peter Dayan, Xiaosi Gu
bioRxiv 737353; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/737353

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