A research team, affiliated with UNIST recently published a study that looked at how people exploit the controllability of their social environment. To understand how a sense of control over others may influence the brain’s decision-making processes, the research team tested the ability of healthy human subjects to play strategic games, such as bargaining.
Published in the November 2021 issue of eLife, this study has been carried out by Professor Dongil Chung in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UNIST, in collaboration with Professor Xiaosi Gu and Dr. Soojung Na at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, United States.
In this study, research team found that people used forward thinking when trying to influence others, for the first time. Their findings also showed that forward thinking happened regardless of whether the subjects could actually influence others and appeared to be driven by neural activity in a well-known decision-making center of the brain.
