TY - JOUR T1 - Guilty by association: How group-based (collective) guilt arises in the brain JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/683730 SP - 683730 AU - Zhiai Li AU - Hongbo Yu AU - Yongdi Zhou AU - Tobias Kalenscher AU - Xiaolin Zhou Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/27/683730.abstract N2 - People do not only feel guilty for transgressions of social norms/expectations that they are causally responsible for, but they also feel guilty for transgressions committed by those they identify as in-group (i.e., collective or group-based guilt). However, the neurocognitive basis of group-based guilt and its relation to personal guilt are unknown. To address these questions, we combined functional MRI with an interaction-based minimal group paradigm in which participants either directly caused harm to victims (i.e., personal guilt), or observed in-group members cause harm to the victims (i.e., group-based guilt). In three experiments (N = 90), we demonstrated that perceived shared responsibility with in-group members in the transgression predicted behavioral and neural manifestations of group-based guilt. Multivariate pattern analysis of the functional MRI data showed that group-based guilt recruited a similar brain representation in anterior middle cingulate cortex as personal guilt. These results have broaden our understanding of how group membership is integrated into social emotions. ER -