Physiological Evidence of Brain's Response to Inequality
Mycos
high and low RWA-SDOs. What if they're different..? And so many lines
of evidence suggest they could well be. This is wild....
Again, from "Motivated Cognition..." Kruglanski, Jost et al, "The core
ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and
justification of inequality."
Gary~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Scientists Find First Physiological Evidence of Brain's Response to
Inequality
ScienceDaily (Feb. 24, 2010) — The human brain is a big believer in
equality -- and a team of scientists from the California Institute of
Technology (Caltech) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, has
become the first to gather the images to prove it.
Specifically, the team found that the reward centers in the human
brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial
reward than when a rich person does. The surprising thing? This
activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in
the rich person's head, rather than the poor person's.
These conclusions, and the functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) studies that led to them, are described in the February 25
issue of the journal Nature.
"This is the latest picture in our gallery of human nature," says
Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at
Caltech and one of the paper's coauthors. "It's an exciting area of
research; we now have so many tools with which to study how the brain
is reacting."
It's long been known that we humans don't like inequality, especially
when it comes to money. Tell two people working the same job that
their salaries are different, and there's going to be trouble, notes
John O'Doherty, professor of psychology at Caltech, Thomas N. Mitchell
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Trinity College Institute
of Neuroscience, and the principal investigator on the Nature paper.
But what was unknown was just how hardwired that dislike really is.
"In this study, we're starting to get an idea of where this inequality
aversion comes from," he says. "It's not just the application of a
social rule or convention; there's really something about the basic
processing of rewards in the brain that reflects these
considerations."
The brain processes "rewards" -- things like food, money, and even
pleasant music, which create positive responses in the body -- in
areas such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and ventral
striatum.
In a series of experiments, former Caltech postdoctoral scholar
Elizabeth Tricomi (now an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers
University) -- along with O'Doherty, Camerer, and Antonio Rangel,
associate professor of economics at Caltech -- watched how the VMPFC
and ventral striatum reacted in 40 volunteers who were presented with
a series of potential money-transfer scenarios while lying in an fMRI
machine.
For instance, a participant might be told that he could be given $50
while another person could be given $20; in a second scenario, the
student might have a potential gain of only $5 and the other person,
$50. The fMRI images allowed the researchers to see how each
volunteer's brain responded to each proposed money allocation.
But there was a twist. Before the imaging began, each participant in a
pair was randomly assigned to one of two conditions: One participant
was given what the researchers called "a large monetary
endowment" ($50) at the beginning of the experiment; the other
participant started from scratch, with no money in his or her pocket.
As it turned out, the way the volunteers -- or, to be more precise,
the reward centers in the volunteers' brains -- reacted to the various
scenarios depended strongly upon whether they started the experiment
with a financial advantage over their peers.
"People who started out poor had a stronger brain reaction to things
that gave them money, and essentially no reaction to money going to
another person," Camerer says. "By itself, that wasn't too
surprising."
What was surprising was the other side of the coin. "In the
experiment, people who started out rich had a stronger reaction to
other people getting money than to themselves getting money," Camerer
explains. "In other words, their brains liked it when others got money
more than they liked it when they themselves got money."
"We now know that these areas are not just self-interested," adds
O'Doherty. "They don't exclusively respond to the rewards that one
gets as an individual, but also respond to the prospect of other
individuals obtaining a reward."
What was especially interesting about the finding, he says, is that
the brain responds "very differently to rewards obtained by others
under conditions of disadvantageous inequality versus advantageous
inequality. It shows that the basic reward structures in the human
brain are sensitive to even subtle differences in social context."
This, O'Doherty notes, is somewhat contrary to the prevailing views
about human nature. "As a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist
who works on reward and motivation, I very much view the brain as a
device designed to maximize one's own self interest," says O'Doherty.
"The fact that these basic brain structures appear to be so readily
modulated in response to rewards obtained by others highlights the
idea that even the basic reward structures in the human brain are not
purely self-oriented."
Camerer, too, found the results thought provoking. "We economists have
a widespread view that most people are basically self-interested, and
won't try to help other people," he says. "But if that were true, you
wouldn't see these sort of reactions to other people getting money."
Still, he says, it's likely that the reactions of the "rich"
participants were at least partly motivated by self-interest -- or a
reduction of their own discomfort. "We think that, for the people who
start out rich, seeing another person get money reduces their guilt
over having more than the others."
Having watched the brain react to inequality, O'Doherty says, the next
step is to "try to understand how these changes in valuation actually
translate into changes in behavior. For example, the person who finds
out they're being paid less than someone else for doing the same job
might end up working less hard and being less motivated as a
consequence. It will be interesting to try to understand the brain
mechanisms that underlie such changes."
The research described in the Nature paper, "Neural evidence for
inequality-averse social preferences," was supported by grants from
the National Science Foundation, the Human Frontier Science Program,
the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the Caltech Brain Imaging
Center.
Sara Robinson
Sara
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Mycos
states virtually as a given that *mankind* is hardwired for
equality...which does in fact back up the anthropological idea that
pre-Neolithic populations tended toward egalitarian social orders.
But!...If we're hardwired for it, then wtf is going on with
conservatives? And isn't this then good evidence to support my
petition effort of having RWA-SDOs placed in the about-to-be-released,
DSM 5!
Sure, I realize I'm being a little off-the-wall with my cut-and-dried
verdict of their guilt as crazies, but the more I look the more it
seems likely that social scientists, Adorno thru the Altemeyer,
haven't been hard enough on these guys.
I didn't sleep last night so there's the possibility that I'm feeling
unusually giddy about this because of mental fatigue. But how do they
square this: "It's long been known that we humans don't like
inequality, especially when it comes to money.But what was unknown was
just how hardwired that dislike really is." , with science that has
determined conservatives have a "tendency to preserve the dominance of
high-status groups, such as men (rather than women), Whites (rather
than Blacks,), upper-class elites (rather than the working class).
Jost and Thompson demonstrated that SDO Scale is composed of two
factors, namely the desire for group-based dominance and opposition to
equality. Scores on the scale have been found also to correlate
reliably with cultural elitism, anti-Black racism, sexism, and RWA,
(.) unsupportive of women’s rights, racial equality, affirmative
action, gay rights".! !
I don't see a way around the fact that either one of these two views
above is wrong, or they're both right and conservatives are mental
mutants.
I sure Dr. Bob would pop in occasionally and set us kids back on the
primrose path when we need it...like now perhaps. <g>
Gary~
Manure Department
"It is only with the onset of civilization, Rousseau claims, that humans
become social beings, and, concomitant with their civilization, natural man
becomes corrupted with the social vices of pride, vanity, greed and
servility"
Civilization has done something to our memes/genes that has resulted in the
RWA/con thought process. I feel it may also have been the precursor of the
ASD trait/state. Both are responses to social uncertainty/ambiguity - in
highly populated complex societies greater than human-scale (>200 people).
In RWA/conservatism it is a social-concept response to reduce anxiety. In
ASD it is a technology/conceptual response in the male part of our brain to
that same source of anxiety. How does that sound?
Rousseau's vices fit the RWA-SDO embrace so sweetly. Anyone blogging the
Science Daily article please consider the French dude too.
Alastair
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Gary Williams
> Rousseau anyone?
> "It is only with the onset of civilization, Rousseau claims, that humans
> become social beings, and, concomitant with their civilization, natural man
> becomes corrupted with the social vices of pride, vanity, greed and
> servility"
> Civilization has done something to our memes/genes that has resulted in the
> RWA/con thought process. I feel it may also have been the precursor of the
> ASD trait/state. Both are responses to social uncertainty/ambiguity - in
> highly populated complex societies greater than human-scale (>200 people).
> In RWA/conservatism it is a social-concept response to reduce anxiety. In
> ASD it is a technology/conceptual response in the male part of our brain to
> that same source of anxiety. How does that sound?
> Rousseau's vices fit the RWA-SDO embrace so sweetly. Anyone blogging the
> Science Daily article please consider the French dude too.
> Alastair
>
>
>
environment, our social structure, our method of obtaining food...all
these things represent drastic changes in the kinds of stimuli our
brains had evolved to process over the prior few million years. The
effect must be similar to the effect that placing a polar bear in a
pool down in San Diego must have on its psyche. It just doesn't seem
reasonable that we should be able to make this transformation without
some part o our brain saying "That's wrong..that's wrong!"
But being the source of our responses to environmental cues, still
evokes a fear response, or pops a stiffee despite the only thing within
10 miles that even resembles a "mate" is the picture in your wallet.
So yeah. If class/caste societies arose only after we moved into
permanent, settled environments where we no longer even knew how to feed
oneself according to nature way of providing, then perhaps the war, the
selfishness, the "dog eat dog" mentality we now call "free-market
capitalism" is merely the rationalizations we came up with over the
millenia for those crazy and extremely selfish types who appeared among
us at the very same time mankind was exposed to all the new, strange,
and radically altered environmental cues that came with sedentary
lifestyles.
We're now all so immersed in them that no one can remember and theres
really no way of knowing that all he conservative craziness began when
we placed ourselves in artificial homes and started to depend on
complete strangers to bring us the food we once had always taken an
active part in the gathering or hunting thereof. Or brains are waiting
for certain cues that never come, and for certain among
us...selfishness, fear, hostility,....that's the reaction our brains
take upon experiencing a disordered connection to "normal" environmental
ad social cues.
Gary