When making decisions on the value of others, people tend to weigh character traits over monetary value. Photo by alphaspirit/Shutterstock

NEW YORK, Aug. 3 (UPI) -- A new study suggests when people are making decisions involving others, they value character traits over absolute material benefit.

In other words, we tend to measure a person's worth by the weight of their character -- not just their pocket book.


"When we learn and make decisions about people, we don't simply look at the positive or negative outcomes they bring to us -- such as whether they gave us a loan or helped us move," lead study author Leor Hackel, a doctoral candidate in New York University's psychology department, said in a press release. "Instead, we often look beyond concrete outcomes to form trait impressions, such as how generous a person seems to be, and these impressions carry more weight in our future social decisions."

In an attempt to better understand the process of personal evaluation, Hackel and his colleagues recruited participants to make a series of "reward-based" decisions while their brain activity was monitored.

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The experiment -- which was detailed in the journal Nature Neuroscience -- began with participants playing a game in which they interacted with donors via an economics computer game. Some actors on the other side of the computer contributed small amounts of money, while others donated large sums. Each of these actors were working with different size pots of money. Participants were informed of each player's donation size and generosity quotient -- the amount of money given compared to the amount available -- separately.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging results showed that participants paid greater attention to a player's generosity quotient, what the scientists called a "trait impression."

This was especially striking, researchers said, given that participants had been aware that a player's reward value was more relevant to success in the economic game. The findings suggests the brain is much more prepared to gauge character values than previously thought.

Afterward, when participants were asked who they would be most likely to interact with again under similar cooperative circumstances, they were more likely to recall more generous players -- those with a larger trait impression.

"We think our findings will change the way scientists think about the role of value and the striatum in learning about people and things," said David Amodio, an associate professor of psychology at NYU. "In other words, our results show that people naturally see others and even objects in terms of more general characteristics -- and not just in terms of mere reward value."