Your brain operates differently in social situations

In recent years, cognitive neuroscientists have discovered thatpeople rarely make decisions in isolation. Humans are sensitive to what others think. A quick phone call to our mother or a long conversation with a friend can make us think twice before making a decision, to give us the necessary courage to follow through with a plan. “There is a fundamental difference between the decisions we make in groups and those made in individual situations.social contextcanmake what we individually did not consider important to become relevant“, said Scott Huetel, co-author of the work.

Huetell and his colleagues at Duke University designed an experiment in which a series of average individuals with no poker experience played a single virtual game against a human and another against a computer opponent. Participants met and greeted their human opponents just before playing the game. Sometimes players were intentionally given a losing hand and had to decide whether to show off to their opponents and bluff.

As they played and decided, the researchers scanned 55 regions in the brains of each participant, and used the data from the nuclear magnetic resonance images to predict how the players would behave. In this way they discovered thatneural activity in a small region of the brain called the temporal-parietal junction can be used to predict what decisions we will make playing pokerbut only against a real human opponent. Among other things, because we put ourselves in the other person’s shoes, we try to find out what they are thinking and make an effort to predict whether the decision will have consequences in future interactions. Definitely,in social and non-social situations our brain behaves differently and we are guided by different criteria. ? Understanding how the brain identifies collaborators from competitors will help us understand phenomena such as dehumanization and empathy.?