Title : Beyond individual choice: How social influence shapes the neural foundations of economic decision-making
Abstract:
Objectives: To characterize how highly cited neuroeconomics research addresses social influence in economic decision-making across publication patterns, themes, methods, and neural systems.
Background: Social context can alter how people assign value and make economic choices, yet neuroeconomic evidence on these effects remains difficult to integrate. Prior studies demonstrated that fairness, trust, and social norms influence decisions through valuation and social-cognitive systems. However, findings are fragmented across behavioral, imaging, clinical, and theoretical traditions, obscuring how the field has developed, which approaches dominate, and where critical evidence gaps remain.
Methods: We review Web of Science Core Collection records published from 2000–2026, rank 152 records by citation count, retain the 100 most-cited eligible articles, standardize bibliographic data, and analyze publication patterns, themes, and methods using descriptive bibliometrics and structured qualitative coding.
Results: The corpus spans 2003–2024, with 58% of articles published during 2008–2014. The clearest imbalance is methodological: reviews, theoretical papers, and conceptual papers comprise 52% of the corpus, whereas functional magnetic resonance imaging accounts for 24%, behavioral or economic-game experiments for 9%, and pharmacological, hormonal, or neurochemical studies for 5%. Clinical and psychiatric research (18%) and neural and biological mechanisms (14%) are the leading themes, while cooperation, field development, consumer applications, and fairness each represent 8–11%. Across themes, studies associate socially influenced choice with distributed valuation, salience, cognitive-control, and mentalizing networks. Citation impact is highly uneven, with the 2003 Ultimatum Game study emerging as the largest outlier.
Conclusion: The findings position social neuroeconomics as an interdisciplinary field connecting social context with distributed value computation, while revealing an evidence base dominated by reviews and correlational neuroimaging. More causal, longitudinal, cross-cultural, and ecologically valid studies using standardized paradigms and diverse samples are needed to test generalizability and connect laboratory findings with real-world decisions.
Keywords: neuroeconomics; social influence; economic decision-making; bibliometrics.
