Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (13 page)

When you are playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma and you have been told that Player B has already chosen to cooperate, your decision to cooperate implies that you care more about Player B’s earning $5 rather than nothing than you care about earning $10 for yourself instead of $5.
Given that you have not met (and will never meet) Player B, this is pretty remarkable.
Would you have guessed that the typical stranger passing you on the sidewalk would engage in this kind of selfless behavior toward you?
How about strangers in the most remote parts of the world?
A large international collaboration examined fifteen preindustrial societies, from the foraging Au of Papua New Guinea to the farming Shona of Niger-Congo, and found that
people made decisions counter to their own self-interest
in each society.
People around the world are willing to get a little less so that a stranger can get a little more.

Assuming for the moment that this behavior is not irrational, do people really prefer to see others do well?
Or do people feel obliged to cooperate?
After hearing the Golden Rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) for the umpteenth time, perhaps
people feel that they are expected to treat others well, whether they want to or not.
Perhaps such people believe that if they violate this rule, others will think less of them, and so they capitulate.
This account is in keeping with scientist and philosopher Richard Dawkins’s counsel that we
“try to teach generosity and altruism
, because we are born selfish.”

Perhaps looking to the brain can help sort this out.
We know what the brain looks like
when we are complying with a social norm, and we know what the brain looks like when we are choosing based on real preferences.
The former involves lateral parts of the prefrontal cortex (that is, the parts of the brain that let us inhibit our desires, among other things), whereas the latter involves the reward system in regions of the brain like the ventral striatum.

James Rilling, a neuroscientist and anthropologist at Emory University, conducted an fMRI study of subjects playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma to find out what is going on
in the minds of people as they cooperate or defect
.
Although staying true to a social norm might lead you to grudgingly cooperate more frequently, the reward system should reveal your real preference for the better financial outcome.
Even if you cooperate 70 percent of the time out of a sense of obligation, a reward system that is selfishly motivated should respond more strongly on the remaining trials when you defect and earn more money for yourself.

In fact, the individuals in Rilling’s study showed the opposite pattern.
When the participants’ partners chose to cooperate, more ventral striatum activity was observed in players when they too had chosen to cooperate, rather than defect.
In other words, there was increased reward activity even though the players were earning less money for themselves.
The ventral striatum seemed to be more sensitive to the total amount earned by both players, rather than to one’s personal outcome.
Moreover, the lateral prefrontal regions were not engaged in the study when subjects cooperated, suggesting that cooperating involves a real preference, not a sense of obligation.

The one hitch in Rilling’s first study was that subjects played
repeatedly with the same partners.
Here, reputation building could have played a role such that early decisions to cooperate might have triggered the reward system as one considered how this strategy would yield larger rewards later on.
But Rilling published another study a few years later in which only a single game was played with each partner,
ruling out long-term strategies like reputation building
.
Nevertheless, he got the same results—mutual cooperation produced the greatest activity in the ventral striatum.
Rilling also conducted trials in which the person in the scanner was informed that the game was being played with a computer opponent.
In this case, mutual cooperation did not activate the reward system.
Our reward system selectively responds to teaming up with other people, even if we earn less money in the process.

Our theory of “who we are” suggests that we cooperate in order to ultimately achieve a better end for ourselves.
Once again we see this theory of human nature is misguided because it doesn’t take into account the social motives that sit alongside our more familiar selfish motives.
Mutual cooperation activates the reward system as an end in itself.

Mooting Altruism

In Isaac Asimov’s book
The End of the Eternity
, a reality-altering time-traveler named Andrew Harlan falls in love with a woman from the future, Nöys.
Knowing that her existence will be obliterated by the next change he is required to make, he hides her in a far distant future century where she will be unaffected.
After he reveals his actions to her, and acknowledges that these actions constitute a great crime among his fellow time-travelers, she is shocked that he would risk his career for her.
“For me, Andrew?
For me?”
she asks.
To which he replies, “No, Nöys, for myself.
I could not bear to lose you.”

Are seemingly selfish acts that we observe ever really altruistic?
Historically, the question has been easy to pose and just as easy for skeptics to dismiss.
Altruism
is defined as helping others in such a way that the long-term material outcome of helping another is believed to have overall negative consequences for the helper.
When Michael Ghiselin wrote,
“Scratch an ‘altruist’ and watch a ‘hypocrite’ bleed,”
the implication is that “on closer inspection, … acts of apparent altruism are really selfishness in disguise.”
Perhaps the person who receives help will reciprocate directly.
Or the person offering help will be seen in a more beneficial way in the eyes of others, allowing him or her to gain more later.
We all wonder at times what people hope to gain from their seemingly altruistic behavior.

Understanding other people’s psychological motivation is tricky because it’s typically their word versus yours.
Let’s say John agrees to switch places with Elaine, who is receiving shocks as part of an experiment.
Earlier John was not getting shocked, and now he is.
Once John takes Elaine’s place, Elaine leaves the experiment, never to be seen again.
Surely John’s act must be altruistic.

Psychologist Daniel Batson showed that
there may be a hidden selfish motivation
at work in John’s willingness to switch, just like the protagonist in Asimov’s story.
Batson conducted ingenious studies in which one person (the observer) had to watch another person (the victim) receive painful shocks.
The victim was clearly very bothered by the shocks and at one point asked if the shocks could be stopped.
The experimenter then asked the observer if he would take the victim’s place and receive the remainder of the shocks.
Some observers were given the choice of either switching places or continuing to watch the victim receive shocks.
Other observers were given the choice of either switching places or going home (without watching any more of the shocks).
Those who would have to stay and continue to watch were much more likely to switch places with the victim than were those who could go home if they declined to switch places.
In other words, if it is easy to escape the unpleasant situation, people do, but if it is hard, people decide that doing “the right thing” is better than having
to watch the other person endure the shocks.
Their willingness to let the victim continue to receive shocks, as long as they won’t have to watch it happen, revealed that their motive was not purely altruistic.

But this study had a twist.
Two other groups of observers were given the same choices—switch/stay or switch/leave.
But these observers had been induced to feel empathy for the victim before the shock procedure began.
The empathizing observers were very likely to switch places when the alternative was to stay and watch the victim receive more shocks.
However, unlike the previous participants, the empathizers were also likely to switch places with the victim even when the alternative was leaving without watching any more shocks being given.
In fact, the empathizers who had the option of escaping the situation were the most likely (91 percent) of any group in the study to agree to the switch.
One has to conclude that the empathizers really were motivated by concern for the other person and not just whether they had to continue watching the other person receive shocks.
These results imply that empathy is a catalyst for altruistic behavior, an idea I will return to in
Chapter 7
.

In considering whether altruistic behavior is really selfless, it is useful to consider the question of why we like to have sex.
We can think about the motivation to have sex on at least two levels.
First, there is an evolutionary motivation for us as a species to have sex because it leads to reproduction.
Those individuals in our evolutionary past with a greater propensity to have sex—with a stronger sex drive—were more likely to reproduce and pass on their sex-preferring genes to their descendants.
Yet the urge to reproduce is not the only or even the primary motivation why we as individuals have sex.
No one is more sex obsessed than teenagers, and yet reproduction is usually the last thing on their minds.
Indeed, fear of pregnancy is a strong deterrent against teen sex.
Most people have sex because it feels good, physically and emotionally.
The evolutionary motivation might be reproduction, but our psychological motivation is pleasure.
Those who find sex more pleasurable
are more likely to reproduce, often accidentally, and pass on those genes for enjoying sex.

This same analysis applies to altruistic behavior.
Although a group of individuals may have a higher chance of passing on their genes if they cooperate and support one another,
the psychological mechanism that motivates us to selflessly help
others may be the intrinsic pleasure that we experience when we do it.
If helping others gives us pleasure,
what some call the
warm glow
of altruistic behavior
, is this selfish or not?
When we observe seemingly altruistic acts, we tend to look for the hidden selfish motive—some material benefit that the person will get in the long run to the ultimate disadvantage of others around him.
In our search to uncover the selfish root of a behavior, we are unlikely to think, “He’s just helping out because it makes him feel good.
I bet he will continue to help others without expecting us to do anything for him in return.
What a selfish bastard!”
Yes, there is a sense in which we can characterize such behavior as selfish, but it is not the kind of selfishness that seems morally questionable.

As the Dalai Lama advises, “If you would like
to be selfish, you should do it in a very intelligent way
.
The stupid way to be selfish is the way we always have worked, seeking happiness for ourselves alone and in the process becoming more and more miserable.
The intelligent way to be selfish is to work for the welfare of others” because doing so is intrinsically pleasurable.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma studies were the first to demonstrate that the brain’s reward system responds to valuing the outcomes of others, in addition to one’s own.
One could argue that the study did not go far enough to prove the case, because when participants chose to cooperate, they were still getting paid, just not as much as they would have received if they had defected.
But a more recent study provides even more compelling evidence that our reward system is sensitive to the welfare of others.

Jorge Moll and his colleagues at the National Institutes of Health ran
an fMRI study looking at the activity in the brain
when we’re
giving to charity.
Individuals in the scanner were asked to make a series of decisions that involved financial outcomes for themselves and for a charitable organization (different decisions involved different charities).
On some trials, individuals were asked whether they would agree to receive $5 for themselves with no consequences for any charity.
Not surprisingly, individuals were very quick to accept this kind of reward.
On other trials, individuals were asked if they were willing to give up some of their winnings (for example, lose $2) so that a charity would receive $5.
Amazingly, as a group, the individuals in this study showed even greater activity throughout the reward regions of the brain when they made the choice to give away some of their own money to help others, compared to when they received money with no strings attached.
Our supposedly selfish reward system seems to like giving more than receiving.

Eva Telzer, Andrew Fuligni, and I replicated this finding with what you might expect to be some of
the most selfish people on the planet: teenagers
.
Instead of mentioning a charity, we asked teenagers to make costly donations to their own families.
We told the teenagers, as well as their parents, that as a precondition of being in the study, any money given to the family must not be spent on the teenager who donated it.
The majority of these teenagers reported taking pleasure in helping their families in daily life; they also showed increased reward system activity when donating their money to their families.

Along similar lines, Tristen Inagaki and Naomi Eisenberger
examined supportive behavior between boyfriends and girlfriends
.
The women in the relationships were lying in the MRI scanner while their boyfriends sat next to them, just outside the scanner.
On some trials of the experiment, the boyfriend would receive an electric shock and on others he would not.
In both cases, the girlfriend in the scanner knew what was happening to him.
On some trials she was instructed either to hold his arm with her hand or to hold a small ball.
Physical contact with one’s partner might be expected to be more rewarding than holding a ball, and, sure enough, this
was the case.
What was more surprising was that the reward system of the girlfriend showed the most activity when she was touching her partner during trials when the boyfriend was being shocked.
On these trials, providing support through physical contact when the girlfriends knew their boyfriends were likely distressed was more rewarding than touching their boyfriends when no support was needed.
Providing social support, even when doing so puts us in closer contact with someone else’s distress, is reinforced in our brains.
It feels good to help those we care about.
Typically, when we think of the benefits of having good social support networks, we imagine ourselves being the beneficiary of support from others.
But this finding suggests that
our support of others could contribute significantly to our well-being
.