Frequency of helping friends and helping strangers is explained by different neural signatures

Abstract

Acts of helping friends and strangers are part of everyday life. However, people vary significantly with respect to how often they help others and with respect to whom they actually help on a day-to-day basis. Despite everyday helping being so pervasive, these individual differences are poorly understood. Here, we used source-localized resting electroencephalography to measure objective and stable individual differences in neural baseline activation in combination with an ecologically valid method that allows assessment of helping behavior in the field. Results revealed that neural baseline activation in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) – a brain region associated with self-control and strategic social behavior – predicts the daily frequency of helping friends, whereas the daily frequency of helping strangers was predicted by neural baseline activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) – a brain region associated with social cognition processes. These findings offer evidence that distinct neural signatures and associated psychological and cognitive processes may underlie the propensity to help friends and strangers in daily life.