We designed a neuroimaging investigation to study some of the mechanistic antecedents of the real-world behaviours and identities that our business leaders previously described in a series of in-depth qualitative studies. We concentrated on a particularly robust aspect of the narrative our sample used to describe when explicitly probed to report difficult decision-making situations, namely their interaction with, and utilisation of information supplied by, other people.
Social aspects of decision making are increasingly of interest in the neuroscience literature. Typical studies concentrate on the biological instantiation of social drivers of decision-making, such as social signals (emotional expressions, tacit or explicit approval, etc.). Such studies conceptualise social signals as reinforcers of behaviour that can drive decision-making in ways similar to natural and contrived rewards, such as food or money. By contrast, in our study, we frame social elements as the context, rather than the driver, of decisions. How does the way we make decisions change based on whether other people are observing, involved, or affected? How do we integrate information about the possible courses of action, with information about the social context within which our decisions are effected and evaluated? Are decisions made in social contexts distinguishable in the brain from equivalent decisions made in non-social contexts?
Specifically, we were interested in the neural and psychological interaction between the objective quality of our decisions and the degree to which they match the decisions of a normative peer group. For example, if we achieve our goal, does it matter what other people would have done in the same situation? If we fail, is failure easier to deal with if we know other people agreed with our decision? Importantly, are business leaders immune to the modulation of decisions by social context? Alternatively, if business leaders care about the social context of their decisions, do they perceive and integrate it differently relative to their age-matched peers? Are these differences tractable at the level of the activation of the underlying brain systems?
To address these questions we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with a behavioural task that presented varying levels of rewards and penalties (decision outcomes). In this novel multiple-choice task, subjects were provided both with value-based decision outcomes and with “social congruence” feedback, i.e. the level of agreement with the choices of others. In order to optimise performance in the task, participants have to counter-intuitively return to choice options that were detrimental in the past. Importantly, the opinion of others, as operationalised in this task, has no bearing on the validity of the participant’s choices – i.e. any modulation of a participant’s behaviour is due to their individual sensitivity to the social context, not on their ability to extract useful information from it.
We found that our leadership sample were more readily able to optimise their behaviour by acting counter-intuitively, especially when low social congruence feedback corroborated their own negative evidence. By contrast, age-matched control participants were unable to successfully overcome the pre-potent tendency to avoid previously punishing options. fMRI analyses across all participants suggest a small set of brain regions mediates the influence of social context on the evaluation of decisions (including the ventromedial prefrontal and fronto-polar cortical regions, the insula, and the anterior cingulate cortex). In our CEO sample, but not our age-matched controls, individual differences in cognitive empathy (the ability to understand another person’s emotional or mental state) were associated with the degree of neural responsivity to negative, but not positive, decision outcomes when experienced in a social context. Given that CEOs showed higher cognitive empathy compared to control participants, this is one of the observations we are keen to further explore. Our findings demonstrate a promising line of investigation about the nature of extraordinary leadership, with valuable insights that complement our rich qualitative data.
