Multimodal ultra-high-field MRI, clinical, cognitive, and genetic profiles across the ALS-FTD spectrum.

Social decisions have direct ramifications for oneself and others. In such decisions, people weigh outcomes for themselves and others. This relative weighting of expected outcomes for self and others has been described as a stable trait. However, when these decisions involve prosocial behavior toward a known recipient, they have been shown to depend on the social context. Previous research has also shown that cognitive demands – such as those induced when processing information in a non-native language, can influence decision-making. Yet, while prosocial behavior and language-related cognitive effects have each been studied separately, their joint influence remains largely unexplored. This is particularly relevant in intergroup contexts, where people are typically more prosocial toward in-group than out-group recipients. In the present study, we used a laboratory-based social-decision task to examine how social factors related to social identity and intergroup relations, together with cognitive factors associated with the language of presentation, jointly influence prosocial decision-making in the broader context of an ongoing intergroup conflict. While the primary focus of research on social decision-making often concerns real-life contexts, laboratory-based tasks offer controlled insights into these behaviors. A widely used task in prosocial decision-making study is the dictator game. This is a two-person game in which one participant, the “dictator,” decides how to allocate a certain sum of money between themselves and another participant who has no control over the distribution. By using variations of this game with multiple sharing decisions, some beneficial to both self and other, researchers can assess each participant’s social value orientation (SVO) – i.e., the extent to which individuals are willing to sacrifice personal gains for the benefit of others. Such social decisions can be affected by cognitive factors. Communicating and thinking in one’s native language (L1) is generally associated with cognitive fluency and emotional resonance, often encouraging intuitive–automatic processing. By contrast, using a second language (L2) typically requires greater cognitive effort, evoking more controlled and analytic processing. Social decisions were shown to be influenced by such processing modes: for example, when participants in cooperation games were forced to decide quickly, they tended to be more prosocial. Thus, L1 use might foster more intuitive and potentially more prosocial decisions, whereas L2 use might encourage slower, more deliberative, and less prosocial choices. However, the degree to which language shapes prosociality may depend on the salience of other factors, particularly intergroup identity.