Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (14 page)

We humans are complicated creatures.
We are unquestionably self-interested.
Adam Smith, one of the founders of modern economics
, was astute when he wrote, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest.”
They help put food on our table because by charging us, they are able to put food on their own.
Yet he was arguably even more wise when he suggested,
“How selfish soever man may be supposed
, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it.”

We tend to think of rewards as material things (food, shelter, iPhones), and we think of those things as having objective value.
Ten dollars is always better than five, and five is always better than zero.
But material rewards are rewarding only because our brains evolved to experience those things as rewarding.
We are also built to take pleasure in cooperating and helping others.
We can call it “selfishness,” but if we do, the notion of selfishness ceases to be a bad thing.
The neuroscience of cooperation and charity eliminates the typical question of altruism (“Are we ever altruistic?”) and replaces it with two new questions: Why are we evolved to enjoy
being altruistic?
and Why don’t we realize that being altruistic can be intrinsically rewarding?
Let’s take these questions in order.

Why Are Social Rewards Rewarding?

As we’ve seen, there are two kinds of social rewards—the social rewards we receive when others let us know they like, respect, or care for us and the social rewards we receive when we care for or treat others well.
It is no accident that this parallels the two sides of the mother-infant relationship.
Having strangers tell us they like us is pleasurable, in part, because we humans have generalized the positive feelings of being cared for by our mothers.
Many mammalian species have shown opioid-linked pleasure responses
in the brain while being groomed by their mother or peers.
But
in humans most of our grooming is verbal
rather than physical.
When others spend time verbally grooming us, it is a sign that we are safe and cared for.
And given our long period of immaturity, this is
an incredibly reinforcing signal to receive
.

That being treated well by others is rewarding isn’t surprising.
We know it feels good to be liked and cared for.
It’s a sign that others will include us when there are material goods to be divvied up between members of the group.
But how do we explain the fact that we are sometimes motivated to help others, even complete strangers, when there is no material benefit for ourselves?
How do we explain truly altruistic sentiments?
The best answer may have something to do with an evolutionary change in parental caregiving.

Mammalian mothers of all stripes are jump-started into care-giving
mode as a function of the birth of their offspring.
Rats begin to bond and groom their offspring within a few days of their pups’ being born; mother sheep bond to their offspring within two hours of birth; and humans begin mentally bonding months before the baby is even born.
In all cases, the neuropeptide
oxytocin
is a critical driver of our caregiving motivations.
Oxytocin’s primary physiological contribution is to facilitate labor
during the birthing process and to promote the flow of milk during breastfeeding.
Within the brain’s reward system, oxytocin also motivates us to approach our infants to support their well-being, and it diminishes the personal distress we ordinarily feel at approaching someone else in distress.

Thus, the two kinds of social rewards depend on different kinds of neurochemical processes.
Being cared for promotes opioid-based pleasure processes in the brain.
In contrast, the effects of oxytocin may be better characterized as modifying
the dopaminergic processes that promote approach behavior.
We reach for the Snickers bar because dopaminergic signals tell our brains that if we eat the Snickers bar, we will enjoy it.
In simple terms, we gravitate toward things the brain has learned to associate with dopaminergic release.
Mammalian brains are loath, however, to approach strangers because they may represent a threat.
And to a rat, a newborn pup really is a stranger.
Mammals are thus in a bit of a bind because, on the one hand, their offspring are strangers that we are built to avoid, and on the other hand, caring for our young is essential for their survival.
Oxytocin appears to alter the dopaminergic response of mammals to their own infants, tipping the balance from avoidance to approach.

It has been suggested that oxytocin is a love drug or a trust hormone, but I prefer to think of oxytocin as the
nurse neuropeptide
.
After college, I spent a year working as a clerk on a surgical unit at St.
Peter’s Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
I worked with nurses every day and the work they do is extraordinary.
Their work is very hard and not so obviously rewarding—much like parenting can be.
Each day, they deal with patients and family members who are at their worst.
And unlike the rest of us, whose stomachs turn at the sight of bodily fluids, and whose eyes roll up into our heads at the wounds that must be dressed, nurses rush in and do what needs to be done.
They don’t do it because they love the patients or trust them.
Often they barely know the patients.
They do it because they are motivated to help, as an end in itself.
Oxytocin turns the rest of
us from zeros to heroes when it comes to caring for our own children.
Nurses do it for everyone every day.

In animals, prosocial sentiments toward one’s offspring have been associated with higher levels of oxytocin modulating reward responses in the ventral striatum and ventral tegmental areas of the brain—both part of the reward system.
One account suggests that
oxytocin released in the ventral tegmental area leads to
the release of dopamine in the ventral striatum region associated with increasing our motivation to seek out a reward.
Fearlessness appears to be influenced by oxytocin interactions
within the septal region, adjacent to the ventral striatum.
Both oxytocin and the septal region of the brain are involved
in diminishing the physiological indicators of distress, which may facilitate helping someone else even when the situation is distressing or gross.
In other words, when we see someone in need, say, someone with a bloody wound, oxytocin may simultaneously increase the reward value of approaching that person and decrease the distress we might have over being near someone else in distress.

Although there are great similarities in how oxytocin promotes care
for offspring across mammalian species, oxytocin has different effects on how primates and nonprimates treat strangers.
In nonprimates, increased oxytocin is associated with increased aggression toward strangers.
This is generally understood in terms of mothers’ protecting their infants from unknown threats.
A mother sheep will attack an unrelated baby lamb
that tries to nurse from her.
But when the oxytocin processes are blocked, the mother sheep will allow the unrelated lamb to nurse.
Thus, in nonprimates, oxytocin promotes direct care of one’s own offspring, including protecting them against others.
This ensures that the mother’s limited resources are spent only on those offspring that will pass on her genes to future generations.

Both the caring- and aggression-related effects of oxytocin have been demonstrated in humans as well.
Administering oxytocin has been shown to increase generosity
when people play behavioral economics
games like the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
On the flip side, psychologist Carsten De Dreu in the Netherlands has demonstrated in multiple studies that
administering oxytocin leads to more aggressive responses
to members of other ethnic groups in the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

While oxytocin can promote ingroup favoritism (that is, toward groups that one is a part of) and hostility toward those who are not part of one’s ingroup, the dividing line between friend or foe differs in a crucial way between primates and other mammals.
In nonpri-mates, oxytocin leads individuals to see all outsiders as possible threats, thus enhancing aggression toward them.
In contrast, humans divide others into at least three categories: members of liked groups, members of disliked groups, and strangers whose group affiliations are unknown.
Administering oxytocin in humans facilitates caregiving
toward both liked group members
and strangers
, but it promotes hostility toward members of disliked groups.

Oxytocin in humans helps to promote altruistic tendencies not toward one’s own group—because that isn’t altruism in the strongest sense of the word—and not toward members of disliked groups.
But oxytocin can increase our generosity toward complete strangers, which is quite magical, as strangers who start with a positive bias toward one another can do great things together, such as building houses, schools, and other institutions that support a society.

Why Don’t We Know?

If you scanned my brain while I ate a scoop of salted caramel ice cream, you would undoubtedly find increased activity throughout my brain’s reward system.
Or you could save a lot of money on fMRI scans and just ask me if I love salted caramel ice cream.
When it comes to ice cream, our conscious experiences and our brains tell the same story.
So why isn’t it the same with social rewards?
Why
doesn’t it seem like being treated fairly would feel good?
Why don’t we recognize that there is something intrinsically rewarding about helping others that does not depend on believing one will benefit materially?
Research suggests the reason is that we feel compelled to tell everyone how selfish we are—even if we aren’t selfish.

I was recently at a meeting of the social psychologists in my department—professors and graduate students.
The area chair made a point of thanking Kelly Gildersleeve, a graduate student who had spent a lot of time over the summer streamlining a bureaucratic process by moving it to the Internet.
When everyone in the room heartily applauded her effort, Kelly blushed and blurted out that she was going to benefit from the streamlining as well, so she would be getting something out of it.
It was a complete lie.
The time she put in will never be offset by the savings she will get in her last year of graduate school.
Kelly told me later that even as she heard herself saying this, she knew it wasn’t true.
But she said those selfish-sounding words anyway.
Kelly helped because she is a kind and thoughtful person who saw a problem and knew she could help.
Kelly helped because it is intrinsically rewarding to help those around you.
For some reason, though, when someone asks us why we help, we often find ourselves saying things that makes us sound more selfish than we are.

Dale Miller, a social psychologist at Stanford University
, has identified the root cause of this faux-selfish behavior.
The theorizing of Hobbes, Hume, and other intellectuals who claim that self-interest is the source of all human motivation has produced a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Their theory and everyone who repeats it have affected how the rest of society behaves.
Because
we have been taught that people are self-interested
, we conform to this cultural norm to avoid standing out.

Miller has shown in multiple experiments that we assume others are far more self-interested than they really are.
In one study, he asked individuals what percentage of undergraduates they thought would agree to give blood for $15 and what percentage would agree
to give blood if there were no financial incentive.
Respondents estimated half as many people would give blood for free as would for the money (32 versus 62 percent).
But in measuring actual volunteer rates, he found that those who were offered no money agreed to give blood 62 percent of the time, only slightly less often than those who were paid (73 percent).

Because of these mistaken assumptions about everyone else’s selfishness, we tend to avoid appearing altruistic ourselves.
We don’t want to appear to be boasting or come off as a goody-two-shoes.
If you believe that people in general don’t think altruism exists, then claiming your own actions are altruistically motivated feels like putting yourself on a pedestal.
For this reason,
when people are asked why they have engaged in prosocial behaviors
, they tend to ascribe their actions to self-interest (“I volunteer because I’m bored, and it gives me something to do”).
When we regularly hear other people giving selfish-sounding reasons for their altruistic behavior, it only serves to bolster our belief that all behavior is self-interested, which in turn makes us less likely to admit our own altruistic motives.
The cycle is self-reinforcing, becoming more and more ingrained over time.

The irony of this was brought home
in another of Miller’s studies
.
People were approached to donate to a charity.
People who were asked to simply donate found it hard to generate a self-interested explanation for helping the charity.
Other people were informed that they would receive a small candle in return for their donation.
The candle created an
exchange fiction
, allowing people to say, “I didn’t donate to help.
I was buying a candle.”
As expected, people were more likely to donate when they would get a candle in return compared to when no candle was offered.
They also donated much more money under these conditions.
Ironically, getting a trinket in return allows us to cover our generosity with a nonaltruistic account and thus frees us to act more altruistically.