[van-discuss] NYT - Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate

[ernie yacub]

For an anarchist analysis of co-operation, see Kropotkin's Mutual Aid...
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/mutaidcontents.html

ernie


July 23, 2002

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

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."