The Neuroscience of Nudge (360G-Wellcome-202434_Z_16_Z)

Nudges are simple behavioural methods designed to influence decision making by taking advantage of people’s implicit biases. One important type of nudge is known as "anchoring." The simple presentation of an irrelevant number affects people’s decisions by shifting estimations towards that number. This behavioural effect is well understood although the mechanism behind the unconscious bias remains unclear. The brain bases of this effect has received surprisingly little attention in the literature. One study found that the medial prefrontal cortex played a crucial role in anchoring theory-of-mind decisions in a social context, suggesting that activity within cortical networks intrinsic to the task is shaped by this extrinsic information. I propose to initiate this investigation by piloting an fMRI experiment to investigate the neural correlates of anchoring in reasoning about uncertainty. The aim is to collect a preliminary data set from a small sample of healthy adults (n=12) to explore whether the experimental paradigm: yields robust behavioural anchoring effects, identifies brain regions whose activity is affected by these anchoring effects, and tests whether these effects are parametric modulated. I predict that within prefrontal regions engaged by the task, I will observe parametric modulation based on the amplitude of the behavioural anchoring effect.