Dr Claudia Civai Seminar
Dr Claudia Civai, a lecturer at the London South Bank University, gained her PhD in Neuroscience from the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy. After her PhD, she spent 3 years working in research in the USA as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Economics of the University of Minnesota. In 2016, she joined the University of Kent and was appointed as a lecturer in Cognitive Psychology. She then joined South Bank University in 2017. Dr Civai is particularly interested in how people perceive unfairness and react to injustice. She is interested in understanding motivational factors of human behaviour in social contexts. Her research focuses on how people integrate emotions and social norms in order to make decisions based on socio-economics, especially when related to the violation of fairness and justice norms. In her line of research, she assimilates both theory and methodology from cognitive psychology, neuroscience, personality psychology and behavioural economies. Dr Civai’s talk largely consisted of the willingness of people to spend their own resources in order to promote compliance with principles such as fairness and cooperation, even if they themselves are not the victims of injustice but are representing for a third party.
The talk culminated in Dr Civai explaining the various studies she carried out to investigate the behavioural and neural signature of social norm compliance. Interestingly, she pointed out that decision neuroscience is rooted in economics, psychology and neuroscience, often intertwined; this was the basis for most of her research. In one of her studies, “the ultimatum game”, skin conductance was measured and displayed a correlation between emotional arousal and
rejecting a monetary proposal. When compared with a computer control, this emotional response was absent which is demonstrative of the social factors at play in decision making. Dr Civai also looked at MRI brain images whilst the participants completed the game and found that the anterior insula, an area of the brain associated with processing negative stimuli, was activated and even more so for unfair stimuli. In another condition whereby the participant was the third-party responder, the medial prefrontal cortex was found to play an important role in differentiating between the self and third-party involvement whilst the anterior insula remains the detector of unfairness in both conditions.
Overall, it was a fantastic talk showing that people reject because of the theories of social preferences that is considered by others regarding preferences and social motivations. Sometimes, following social norms means going against rationality; we reject because unfairness is frustrating which and people do reject unfairness in general. People were more aroused in the third-party condition, implying that emotion plays a huge part but also another factor as participants were still aroused for the third part condition but not as much. However, participants didn’t reject advantageous unfairness. Neural evidence showed in DCS where rejection rate in TP is higher than in MS under cathodal stimulation of Medical Prefrontal Cortex (signals are self-interested motivations). The same circuit underpins punishment and motivation where costly altruistic behaviour where the second party punishment exists, and its rewarding is striatum activation. Ultimately, Dr Civai’s talk was well explained and very intriguing; questions at the end were answered with full understanding, increasing our interest towards social norm compliance based on behavioural and neural signature.
