"The illusion of altruism: hidden selfish motives in charitable giving with risky choices", Prof. Qiang SHEN, Department of Marketing, School of Business and Management, Shanghai International Studies University

Title: The illusion of altruism: hidden selfish motives in charitable giving with risky choices
Speaker: Prof. Qiang SHEN, Department of Marketing, School of Business and Management, Shanghai International Studies University
Date: May 23, 2025 (Fri.)
Time: 14:00–15:00
Location: T7-106-R1

Abstract:

The degree of altruism toward others is central to decision-making in economics, management, and psychology. Recent studies suggest that individuals may use uncertainty in decision-making as an excuse to reduce prosocial behavior. However, the temporal dynamics by which individuals conceal selfish motives in risky choices remain underexplored. To address this, we conducted three studies—a behavioral experiment, a mouse-tracking experiment, and an eye-tracking experiment—coupled with computational modeling using the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) to uncover the underlying mechanisms. Participants evaluated risky versus safe options for themselves or for a charity, under conditions both with and without interpersonal trade-offs. Behavioral results show that prosocial individuals maintain largely consistent responses across conditions, whereas selfish individuals systematically shift their risk attitudes in a self-serving manner, exhibiting a prominent excuse-driven pattern. Drift diffusion modeling reveals parallel shifts in both decision weights and starting points in the trade-off condition, with this effect being particularly pronounced in the selfish group. Mouse-tracking data show that trajectory-derived latency differences between safe and risky choices primarily reflect decision weights, while the area under the curve (AUC), associated with initial bias, captures decisional conflict and outperforms response time in predicting choice. Complementarily, eye-tracking data reveal that fixation duration reflects decision weighting, while pupil dilation indicates the exertion of cognitive effort during choice selection for both self and others. These individual-specific heterogeneities in intra-choice dynamics, captured by DDM parameters and decision process measures from both mouse and eye tracking, not only uncover the mechanisms of excuse-driven behavior but also provide a predictive framework for understanding how altruistic and selfish tendencies unfold in uncertain decision contexts.

Speaker Bio:

Qiang Shen is a Professor and doctoral advisor at the School of International Business Administration, Shanghai International Studies University (SISU). He is a core member of the Ministry of Education and Shanghai Key Laboratory for Brain-Machine Collaborative Information Behavior, as well as the SISU Center for Magnetic Resonance Imaging. He currently serves as the Director of the Institute of Computational Neuroscience. He was selected as one of the first recipients of the “Eastern Young Talents” program in Shanghai and holds the title of “Zhuoyue Zhiyuan Scholar” at SISU.

His research focuses on consumer behavior, consumer neuroscience, and decision neuroscience, with a particular emphasis on integrating artificial intelligence (e.g., machine learning and deep learning) with neuroscience tools. He conducts interdisciplinary research in consumer and decision behavior through experimental and computational modeling approaches. His work has been cited over 1,800 times on Google Scholar. As the first or corresponding author, he has published over ten research articles in top-tier journals including Management Science, Journal of Economic Theory, Psychological Medicine, Neuropsychologia, and Cerebral Cortex. As a co-author, he has published additional papers in journals such as Nature, Decision Support Systems, Behavior Research Methods, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and Science Bulletin.

He has led multiple national and provincial-level projects, including two General Programs and one Youth Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), the Ministry of Education’s Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Program, as well as projects supported by the Natural Science Foundation and Philosophy and Social Sciences Foundation of Zhejiang Province. He also participated in major national initiatives such as the “Brain Science and Brain-Inspired Intelligence” program under China’s Sci-Tech Innovation 2030 agenda and a key NSFC strategic project. Additionally, he leads academic-industry collaboration projects supported by both the Ministry of Education and the Zhejiang provincial government.

His honors include the 7th Higher Education Scientific Research Outstanding Achievement Award from the Ministry of Education, Best Paper Awards from the Annual Conference of the China Game Theory and Experimental Economics Association, the China Behavioral and Experimental Economics Forum, and an Innovation Achievement Award from the China Information Economics Society. He is currently a committee member of the Neuro-Management and Neuro-Engineering Division of the Management Science and Engineering Society, Deputy Secretary-General of the Neuro-Management and Economics Committee of the China Society of Technical Economics, and the founder of the Computational Decision Neuroscience (CDN) Summer School and Decision Neuroscience Symposium.