Giving behavior and social decision-making in the age of conscious capitalism: A case for neuroscience

Giving behavior is governed by empathic, emotion-regulating and social cognition processes that support altruistic behavior, which is one of the factors that determine social interaction. According to Mauss (1925), societies have advanced to the point where they, their subgroups and finally their individuals are able to make their relationships stable thanks to giving, receiving and finally reciprocating. In this framework, the gift represents a free and unrestricted exchange through which the society emerge and social order is maintained (Mauss, 1925; Adorno, 1994). “Cuddling for survival” is indeed based on the idea that altruistic individuals profit back by investing in their social environments (Nowak, 2012). Social welfare today is heavily influenced by altruistic and philanthropic behaviors, which are being increasingly studied in neuroscience and neuroeconomics. One reason is that the brain has variable ways of calculating, interacting, and implementing variables in economic models of altruistic choice (Hutcherson et al., 2015). Indeed, altruistic and empathic decision-making emerged from the stochastic accumulation of relative value signals that are linearly weighted based on information about self and other payoffs in a multi-attribute attentional drift-diffusion model (Milosavljevic et al., 2010; Morishima et al., 2012; Geoffrey Fisher, 2021; Yang and Krajbich, 2023). Although neuroscientific knowledge comes overwhelmingly into play in the debate about the motivational drives inherent in giving behavior, the development of observational and intervention models is headed by the social and economic sciences. This article aims to encourage the use of neuroscientific methods to philanthropy and the culture of giving. The case of leadership in the evolving framework of conscious capitalism is taken as the starting point for discussion.