Fw: NYTimes.com Article: Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate

[Guest guest]

>

>

> Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate

>

> July 23, 2002

> By NATALIE ANGIER

What feels as good as chocolate on the tongue or money in

> the bank but won't make you fat or risk a subpoena from the

> Securities and Exchange Commission?

>

> Hard as it may be to believe in these days of infectious

> greed and sabers unsheathed, scientists have discovered

> that the small, brave act of cooperating with another

> person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity over

> selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

>

> Studying neural activity in young women who were playing a

> classic laboratory game called the Prisoner's Dilemma, in

> which participants can select from a number of greedy or

> cooperative strategies as they pursue financial gain,

> researchers found that when the women chose mutualism over

> "me-ism," the mental circuitry normally associated with

> reward-seeking behavior swelled to life.

>

> And the longer the women engaged in a cooperative strategy,

> the more strongly flowed the blood to the pathways of

> pleasure.

>

> The researchers, performing their work at Emory University

> in Atlanta, used magnetic resonance imaging to take what

> might be called portraits of the brain on hugs.

>

> "The results were really surprising to us," said Dr.

> Gregory S. Berns, a psychiatrist and an author on the new

> report, which appears in the current issue of the journal

> Neuron. "We went in expecting the opposite."

>

> The researchers had thought that the biggest response would

> occur in cases where one person cooperated and the other

> defected, when the cooperator might feel that she was being

> treated unjustly.

>

> Instead, the brightest signals arose in cooperative

> alliances and in those neighborhoods of the brain already

> known to respond to desserts, pictures of pretty faces,

> money, cocaine and any number of licit or illicit delights.

>

>

> "It's reassuring," Dr. Berns said. "In some ways, it says

> that we're wired to cooperate with each other."

>

> The study is among the first to use M.R.I. technology to

> examine social interactions in real time, as opposed to

> taking brain images while subjects stared at static

> pictures or thought-prescribed thoughts.

>

> It is also a novel approach to exploring an ancient

> conundrum, why are humans so, well, nice? Why are they

> willing to cooperate with people whom they barely know and

> to do good deeds and to play fair a surprisingly high

> percentage of the time?

>

> Scientists have no trouble explaining the evolution of

> competitive behavior. But the depth and breadth of human

> altruism, the willingness to forgo immediate personal gain

> for the long-term common good, far exceeds behaviors seen

> even in other large-brained highly social species like

> chimpanzees and dolphins, and it has as such been difficult

> to understand.

>

> "I've pointed out to my students how impressive it is that

> you can take a group of young men and women of prime

> reproductive age, have them come into a classroom, sit down

> and be perfectly comfortable and civil to each other," said

> Dr. Peter J. Richerson, a professor of environmental

> science and policy at the University of California at Davis

> and an influential theorist in the field of cultural

> evolution. "If you put 50 male and 50 female chimpanzees

> that don't know each other into a lecture hall, it would be

> a social explosion."

>

> Dr. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and colleagues

> recently presented findings on the importance of punishment

> in maintaining cooperative behavior among humans and the

> willingness of people to punish those who commit crimes or

> violate norms, even when the chastisers take risks and gain

> nothing themselves while serving as ad hoc police.

>

> In her survey of the management of so-called commons in

> small-scale communities where villagers have the right, for

> example, to graze livestock on commonly held land, Dr.

> Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University found that all

> communities have some form of monitoring to gird against

> cheating or using more than a fair share of the resource.

>

> In laboratory games that mimic small-scale commons, Dr.

> Richerson said, 20 to 30 percent have to be coerced by a

> threat of punishment to cooperate.

>

> Fear alone is not highly likely to inspire cooperative

> behavior to the degree observed among humans. If research

> like Dr. Fehr's shows the stick side of the equation, the

> newest findings present the neural carrot - people

> cooperate because it feels good to do it.

>

> In the new findings, the researchers studied 36 women from

> 20 to 60 years old, many of them students at Emory and

> inspired to participate by the promise of monetary rewards.

> The scientists chose an all-female sample because so few

> brain-imaging studies have looked at only women. Most have

> been limited to men or to a mixture of men and women.

>

> But there is a vast body of non- imaging data that rely on

> using the Prisoner's Dilemma.

>

> "It's a simple and elegant model for reciprocity," said Dr.

> James K. Rilling, an author on the Neuron paper who is at

> Princeton. "It's been referred to as the E. coli of social

> psychology."

>

> >From past results, the researchers said, one can assume

> that neuro- imaging studies of men playing the game would

> be similar to their new findings with women.

>

> The basic structure of the trial had two women meet each

> other briefly ahead of time. One was placed in the scanner

> while the other remained outside the scanning room. The two

> interacted by computer, playing about 20 rounds of the

> game. In every round, each player pressed a button to

> indicate whether she would "cooperate" or "defect." Her

> answer would be shown on-screen to the other player.

>

> The monetary awards were apportioned after each round. If

> one player defected and the other cooperated, the defector

> earned $3 and the cooperator nothing. If both chose to

> cooperate, each earned $2. If both opted to defect, each

> earned $1.

>

> Hence, mutual cooperation from start to finish was a far

> more profitable strategy, at $40 a woman, than complete

> mutual defection, which gave each $20.

>

> The risk that a woman took each time she became greedy for

> a little bit more was that the cooperative strategy would

> fall apart and that both would emerge the poorer.

>

> In some cases, both women were allowed to pursue any

> strategy that they chose. In other cases, the non- scanned

> woman would be a "confederate" with the researchers,

> instructed, unbeknown to the scanned subject, to defect

> after three consecutive rounds of cooperation, the better

> to keep things less rarefied and pretty and more lifelike

> and gritty.

>

> In still other experiments, the woman in the scanner played

> a computer and knew that her partner was a machine. In

> other tests, women played a computer but thought that it

> was a human.

>

> The researchers found that as a rule the freely

> strategizing women cooperated. Even occasional episodes of

> defection, whether from free strategizers or confederates,

> were not necessarily fatal to an alliance.

>

> "The social bond could be reattained easily if the defector

> chose to cooperate in the next couple of rounds," another

> author of the report, Dr. Clinton D. Kilts, said, "although

> the one who had originally been `betrayed' might be wary

> from then on."

>

> As a result of the episodic defections, the average

> per-experiment take for the participants was in the $30's.

> "Some pairs, though, got locked into mutual defection," Dr.

> Rilling said.

>

> Analyzing the scans, the researchers found that in rounds

> of cooperation, two broad areas of the brain were

> activated, both rich in neurons able to respond to

> dopamine, the brain chemical famed for its role in

> addictive behaviors.

>

> One is the anteroventral striatum in the middle of the

> brain right above the spinal cord. Experiments with rats

> have shown that when electrodes are placed in the striatum,

> the animals will repeatedly press a bar to stimulate the

> electrodes, apparently receiving such pleasurable feedback

> that they will starve to death rather than stop pressing

> the bar.

>

> Another region activated during cooperation was the

> orbitofrontal cortex in the region right above the eyes. In

> addition to being part of the reward-processing system, Dr.

> Rilling said, it is also involved in impulse control.

>

> "Every round, you're confronted with the possibility of

> getting an extra dollar by defecting," he said. "The choice

> to cooperate requires impulse control."

>

> Significantly, the reward circuitry of the women was

> considerably less responsive when they knew that they were

> playing against a computer. The thought of a human bond,

> but not mere monetary gain, was the source of contentment

> on display.

>

> In concert with the imaging results, the women, when asked

> afterward for summaries of how they felt during the games,

> often described feeling good when they cooperated and

> expressed positive feelings of camaraderie toward their

> playing partners.

>

> Assuming that the urge to cooperate is to some extent

> innate among humans and reinforced by the brain's feel-good

> circuitry, the question of why it arose remains unclear.

> Anthropologists have speculated that it took teamwork for

> humanity's ancestors to hunt large game or gather difficult

> plant foods or rear difficult children. So the capacity to

> cooperate conferred a survival advantage on our forebears.

>

> Yet as with any other trait, the willingness to abide by

> the golden rule and to be a good citizen and not cheat and

> steal from one's neighbors is not uniformly distributed.

>

> "If we put some C.E.O.'s in here, I'd like to see how they

> respond," Dr. Kilts said. "Maybe they wouldn't find a

> positive social interaction rewarding at all."

>

> A Prisoner's Dilemma indeed.

>

>

>

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/health/psychology/23COOP.html?ex=102848689

8&ei=1&en=ad636fcd13a54508

>

>

>

> HOW TO ADVERTISE

>

> For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters

> or other creative advertising opportunities with The

> New York Times on the Web, please contact

> onlinesales (AT) nytimes (DOT) com or visit our online media

> kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

>

> For general information about NYTimes.com, write to

> help (AT) nytimes (DOT) com.

>

> Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

>