TY - JOUR T1 - The hidden cost of receiving favors: A theory of indebtedness JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/2020.02.03.926295 SP - 2020.02.03.926295 AU - Xiaoxue Gao AU - Eshin Jolly AU - Hongbo Yu AU - Huiying Liu AU - Xiaolin Zhou AU - Luke J. Chang Y1 - 2020/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/29/2020.02.03.926295.abstract N2 - 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 large-scale experience sampling, interpersonal games, computational modeling, and neuroimaging. Our model captures how individuals infer the altruistic and strategic intentions of the benefactor. These inferences produce distinct feelings of guilt and obligation that together comprise indebtedness and motivate reciprocity. Altruistic intentions convey care and concern and are associated with activity in the insula, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, while 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 StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest. ER -