Social Decision Preferences for Close Others Are Embedded in Neural and Linguistic Representations

Abstract

Humans frequently make decisions that impact close others. Prior research has shown that people have stable preferences regarding such decisions and maintain rich, nuanced mental representations of their close social partners. Yet, if and how such mental representations shape social decisions preferences remains to be seen. Using a combination of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and natural language processing, this study investigated how neural and linguistic representations of close others relate to social decision-making. After nominating a parent and friend, male and female participants ( N  = 63) rated their characteristics while undergoing fMRI and made hypothetical social decisions involving said parent and friend. Neural representations of parents and friends, relative to the self, were linked to social decision preferences. Specifically, greater neural similarity between self and parent in the temporoparietal junction and nucleus accumbens was associated with a preference for parents, while greater self–friend similarity in the medial prefrontal cortex was associated with friend preference. In a follow-up study, linguistic analysis of written descriptions of close others from an independent sample of males and females ( N  = 1,641) revealed that social decision preferences could be reliably predicted from semantic features of the text. High correspondence between neural and linguistic data in the imaging sample further strengthened the association with social decision preferences. These findings help elucidate the neural and linguistic underpinnings of social decision-making, emphasizing the critical role of mental representations in guiding choices involving familiar others.