关键词: 亲社会行为, 认知努力, 奖赏, 努力悖论

Abstract: Prosocial behavior often requires individuals to incur personal costs to benefit others. While many studies have focused on benefits to others, the effects of self-costs on prosocial behavior remain largely unexplored. The few studies examining self-costs have concentrated on the trade-off between effort costs and monetary rewards, overlooking the broader neural dynamic process of how effort costs modulate others' benefits. Recently, we have demonstrated an effort paradox mechanism where self-serving effort both prospectively discounts and retrospectively increases reward value. We hypothesize that this two-stage model between effort and reward may represent a new mechanism for prosocial behavior. To test this hypothesis, we will combine behavioral experiments with EEG and fMRI measures to examine neural dynamics when people exert cognitive effort to earn rewards for themselves and others and further to determine whether the neural dynamics is domain-general or domain-specific across different types of effort and benefit. Our findings will elucidate the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the effects of prosocial effort on reward processing. This addresses the theoretical gap in mainstream theories and provides a new perspective on the relationship between self-costs and others' benefits in prosocial behavior and the promotion of such behavior.

Key words: prosocial behavior, cognitive effort, reward, effort paradox