TY - JOUR T1 - Humans Use Forward Thinking to Exert Social Control JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/737353 SP - 737353 AU - Soojung Na AU - Dongil Chung AU - Andreas Hula AU - Jennifer Jung AU - Vincenzo G. Fiore AU - Peter Dayan AU - Xiaosi Gu Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/22/737353.abstract N2 - Social control, the ability to exert influence over others, is critical in interpersonal 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 forward 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 forward 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. ER -