Pay to know me in your eyes: A computational account and oxytocin modulation of social evaluation

People are eager to know and recast the self in the eyes of others, even at a personal cost. However, it remains unknown what drives people to pursue costly evaluations of the self. Here, we propose that the evaluation of the self is valuable and that such subjective value placed on evaluation drives the costly-to-know behavior. By measuring the amount of money that individuals would forgo for the opportunity to know evaluations from other people (social evaluation) or a computer program (non-social evaluation), we quantified the subjective value individuals assigned to the evaluation on the self. The results from 5 studies ( n = 375) lent cognitive and computational support for this hypothesis. Furthermore, the subjective value was modulated by the source and valence of the evaluation. Participants equally valued positive and negative non-social evaluations, characterized by a shared unknown aversion computation. However, individuals computed independent unknown aversion towards positive and negative social evaluations and placed a higher value on the opportunity to know another person’s evaluation on positive than negative aspects. Such a valence-dependent valuation of the social evaluation was facilitated by oxytocin, a neuropeptide linked to linked to social feedback learning and valuation processes, which decreased the value ascribed to negative social evaluation. Taken together, the current study reveals the psychological and computational processes underlying self-image formation and updating and suggests a role of oxytocin in modulating the value of social evaluation.