• Posted February 11, 2026

Brain Stimulation Can Prompt People To Behave Less Selfishly, Experiment Shows

What does it take to make others behave less selfishly and put others’ needs before their own?

Electrical zaps to the brain can do the trick, a new study shows.

Stimulating two brain areas increased people’s ability to behave altruistically, researchers reported Feb. 10 in the journal PLOS Biology.

Specifically, getting these brain regions to fire in tandem increased the likelihood a person would share more reward money with someone else.

“We identified a pattern of communication between brain regions that is tied to altruistic choices,” said senior researcher Christian Ruff, a professor of neuroeconomics and decision neuroscience with the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

“This improves our basic understanding of how the brain supports social decisions, and it sets the stage for future research on cooperation — especially in situations where success depends on people working together,” he said in a news release.

For the new study, researchers asked 44 people to participate in what they called a “Dictator Game.”

In the game, participants must make quick judgments regarding an amount of money they’ll split with another person. Each time, the person could make more or less money than their partner, but the amounts varied.

During the game, participants wore electrodes on their scalp that sent current to the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain. The stimulation was set up to make the brain cells in those areas to fire together in repetitive patterns.

Results showed that people were slightly more likely to make an altruistic choice if the two brain regions had synchronous gamma wave rhythms. 

Gamma waves are the fastest signals produced by the brain, and are heavily involved in problem-solving, learning and intense concentration.

Analysis showed that the brain stimulation nudged participants’ unselfish preferences, making them consider their partner more when weighing each money offer.

“What’s new here is evidence of cause and effect: When we altered communication in a specific brain network using targeted, non-invasive stimulation, people’s sharing decisions changed in a consistent way — shifting how they balanced their own interests against others,’ ” lead researcher Jie Hu, a scholar in psychology at East China Normal University in Shanghai, said in a news release.

Researchers noted that they did not directly record brain activity during the experiment, so they can’t draw a direct cause-and-effect link between the stimulation and altruism. Future studies should use EEG scans to track the direct effect of stimulation on brain activity, they said.

However, the results indicate that synchronizing these two areas of the brain might promote less selfishness.

“We were struck by how boosting coordination between two brain areas led to more altruistic choices,” said researcher Marius Moisa, head of brain stimulation, EEG and pharmacology at the University of Zurich Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems in Switzerland. “When we increased synchrony between frontal and parietal regions, participants were more likely to help others, even when it came at a personal cost.”

More information

Johns Hopkins Medicine has more on noninvasive brain stimulation.

SOURCE: PLOS, news release, Feb. 10, 2026