Calibrating Artificial Guilt: Neurally Grounded Reward Shaping for Prosocial Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning often adds social terms to individual rewards, yet the scale of those terms is usually chosen by hand. We ask whether a guilt signal can instead be calibrated from human neural and behavioural data and transferred to artificial agents. Using the public SoDec responsibility fMRI dataset (40 participants), we fit a subject-fixed-effects regression of momentary-happiness changes on outcome-type counts and recover a guilt weight as the Partner-negative minus Social-negative contrast (\hat{w}=1.118, Cohen's d=0.214). We embed this weight in a two-agent Social Lottery environment and train independent Proximal Policy Optimization actor-critics under four shaping regimes: neurally calibrated, uniform constant, zero (selfish), and a unit-coefficient oracle. Across 1{,}000 evaluation episodes per condition, the calibrated agents track the human Social safe-choice rate most closely (0.459 vs.\ human 0.484; KL=0.0012), while the other three conditions deviate by one to three orders of magnitude in KL. Human neurobehavioural priors can therefore act as quantitative constraints on prosocial reward shaping.