The Prisoner’s Dilemma paradigm provides a neurobiological framework for the social decision cascade

To function during social interactions, we must be able to consider and coordinate our actions with other people’s perspectives. This process unfolds from decision-making, to anticipation of that decision’s consequences, to feedback about those consequences, in what can be described as a “cascade” of three phases. The iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (iPD) task, an economic-exchange game used to illustrate how people achieve stable cooperation over repeated interactions, provides a framework for examining this “social decision cascade”. In the present study, we examined neural activity associated with the three phases of the cascade, which can be isolated during iPD game rounds. While undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 31 adult participants made a) decisions about whether to cooperate with a co-player for a monetary reward, b) anticipated the co-player’s decision, and then c) learned the co-player’s decision. Across all three phases, participants recruited the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), regions implicated in numerous facets of social reasoning such as perspective-taking and the judgement of intentions. Additionally, a common distributed neural network underlies both decision-making and feedback appraisal; however, differences were identified in the magnitude of recruitment between both phases. Furthermore, there was limited evidence that anticipation following the decision to defect evoked a neural signature that is distinct from the signature of anticipation following the decision to cooperate. This study is the first to delineate the neural substrates of the entire social decision cascade in the context of the iPD game.