Abstract
Recent laboratory research in cognitive neuroscience has begun to explore paradigms that offer fruitful avenues to examine how processes involving a sense of fairness may be encoded in the human brain. Most of this research is embedded within the field of Decision Neuroscience, an interdisciplinary effort to better understand the fundamentals of human decision-making. This line of research employs a combination of game theoretic models with online measurement of brain activity using techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging, as well as interference with this activity using brain-stimulation techniques like transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation during decision-making. This rich combination of techniques allows for the discrimination and modeling of processes that are often hard to separate purely at the behavioral level. In this chapter, we highlight the brain systems that have been most consistently identified and review the psychological and computational roles they may play in fairness-related decision-making.
