A Multidimensional View on Social and Non-Social Rewards

Abstract

Social rewards are a broad and heterogeneous set of stimuli including for instance smiling faces, gestures, or praise. They have been widely investigated in cognitive and social neuroscience as well as psychology. Research often contrasts the neural processing of social rewards with non-social ones, with the aim to demonstrate the privileged and unique nature of social rewards or to examine shared neural processing underlying them. However, such comparisons mostly neglect other important dimensions of rewards that are conflated in those types of rewards: primacy, temporal proximity, duration, familiarity, source, tangibility, naturalness, and magnitude. We identify how commonly used rewards in both social and non-social domains may differ in respect to these dimensions and how their interaction calls for careful consideration of alternative interpretations of observed effects. Additionally, we propose potential solutions on how to adapt the multidimensional view to experimental research. Altogether, these methodological considerations aim to inform and improve future experimental designs in research utilizing rewarding stimuli, especially in the social domain.

Keywords: familiarity; non-social reward; primacy; reinforcement learning; reward dimension; social reward; tangibility.

Figure 1

Interplay of the sociality and other reward dimensions. The x-axis represents the sociality dimension. The provided cases illustrate examples of rewards used in psychology and neuroscience placed along the dimensions discussed in this article. The spatial distance between the cases does not directly depict differences in their rewarding value.