Associations Between Neural Responses to Social Fairness and Financial Exploitation Vulnerability Vary With Age and Emotional Intelligence

Financial exploitation often arises in social contexts in which individuals must evaluate fairness, trust, and interpersonal information during financial decisions. We examined whether neural responses to fairness in social versus nonsocial contexts relate to financial exploitation vulnerability and whether these relationships vary with age, emotional intelligence, and affect. A total of 310 adults spanning ages 21-89 completed an fMRI Ultimatum Game in which they accepted or rejected offers from human and computer partners, along with measures of financial exploitation vulnerability, emotional intelligence, and affect. Participants were strongly sensitive to offer fairness, and individual differences in behavioral sensitivity to partner type were associated with social-relative anterior insula responses to unfairness. Greater baseline negative affect was associated with stronger anterior insula differentiation between social and nonsocial fairness. Financial exploitation vulnerability was associated with prefrontal responses to social-relative fairness in ways that depended on individual characteristics: age moderated its association with dorsomedial prefrontal cortex activation, whereas emotional intelligence moderated its association with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation. Whole-brain connectivity analyses further showed that age moderated associations between emotional intelligence and executive control network connectivity with posterior cingulate and right temporoparietal regions. These findings suggest that vulnerability to financial exploitation is reflected in how social context is integrated with affective and individual characteristics across adulthood.