A Neural Marker of Costly Punishment Behavior

Human readiness to incur personal costs to punish norm violators is a key force in the maintenance of social norms. The willingness to punish is, however, characterized by vast individual heterogeneity that is poorly understood. In fact, this heterogeneity has so far defied explanations in terms of individual-level demographic or psychological variables. Here, we use resting electroencephalography, a stable measure of individual differences in cortical activity, to show that a highly specific neural marker—baseline cortical activity in the right prefrontal cortex—predicts individuals’ punishment behavior. The analysis of task-independent individual variation in cortical baseline activity provides a new window into the neurobiology of decision making by bringing dispositional neural markers to the forefront of the analysis.