Posted on 07/19/2002 4:21:00 PM PDT by Nebullis
Functional MRI scans have revealed a "biologically embedded" basis for altruistic behavior, with several characteristic regions of the brain being activated when players of a game called "Prisoner's Dilemma" decide to trust each other and cooperate, rather than betray each other for immediate gain, say researchers from Emory University. They report on their study in the July 18 issue of the journal Neuron, published by Cell Press.
For many years, evolutionary biologists, behaviorists, economists and political scientists have attempted to understand why cooperation exists between human beings, even though that cooperation may not result in a direct or immediate reward. This unselfish behavior called "altruism" is almost uniquely a human trait.
Up until now, almost all brain imaging experiments that have studied the social brain have done so by exposing subjects to static 2-D images inside the scanner. "This study represents an attempt to learn about the social brain by scanning people as they are engaged in a true social interaction," said James K. Rilling, Ph.D., principal investigator in the Emory study, who is currently serving a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University. In the Fall of 2003, Dr. Rilling will return to Emory as a faculty member with a joint appointment in the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) at Emory University School of Medicine and the Emory University Department of Anthroplogy.
In two separate experiments, the researchers used fMRI to scan the brains of 36 women while they played the "Prisoner's Dilemma Game," a decades-old model for cooperation based on reciprocal altruism. Two players independently chose to either cooperate with each other or not (defect), and each was awarded a sum of money that depended upon the interaction of both players' choices in that round.
In the first experiment, 19 subjects were scanned in four game sessions designed to observe neural function during cooperation and non-cooperation during both human interactions (social) and interactions with a computer (non-social). The results of the first experiment revealed different patterns of neural activation depending on whether the playing partner was identified as a human or a computer. In the second experiment, 17 subjects were scanned during three game sessions, focusing specifically on human interaction.
Mutual cooperation was the most common outcome in games played with presumed human partners in both experiments, even though a player was maximally rewarded for defecting when the other player cooperated. During the mutually cooperative social interactions, activation was noted in those areas of the brain that are linked to reward processing: the nucleus accumbens, the caudate nucleus, ventromedial frontal/orbitofrontal cortex and rostral anterior cingulate cortex.
"Our study shows, for the first time, that social cooperation is intrinsically rewarding to the human brain, even in the face of pressures to the contrary, " said Gregory S. Berns, M.D., Ph.D., co-investigator and associate professor of psychiatry in the Emory University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and member of the CBN. "It suggests that the altruistic drive to cooperate is biologically embedded-- either genetically programmed or acquired through socialization during childhood and adolescence."
"Reciprocal altruism activates a reward circuit, and this activation may often be sufficiently reinforcing to override subsequent temptations to accept but not reciprocate altruism. This may be what motivates us to persist with cooperative social interactions and reap the benefits of sustained mutual cooperation," said Dr. Rilling.
"The combination of game behavior and functional brain imaging also provides a unique paradigm to explore the neural basis of social behavioral disorders such as autism, drug addiction and sociopathy, that are characterized by deficits in social reciprocity, impulse regulation, or social reward processing," adds Clint Kilts, Ph.D., co-investigator and associate professor of psychiatry at Emory. "It defines the most complex form of the human genesis of a social bond. It may help us define why wars are fought and loves are lost."
The study was sponsored by the Markey Center for Neurological Sciences Fellowship, National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). Other Emory researchers involved in the study were David A. Gutman, Thorsten R. Zeh, and Giuseppe Pagnoni, Ph.D.
There's no sense I can see in trying to explain further. What I say ain't what you hear ... so be it.
As someone knowledgeable in these areas, what is your take on this article?
Oops, I thought I had already posted this early on, but apparently not:
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Note to libertarians: cooperation, not just self-interest is hardwired.
Note to Nebullis: Cooperation is in our long term self-interest - which is why it's hardwired!
Even when unemotional software agents play the Prisoners' Dilemma (the recurring kind where you'll be encountering the same players in the future), the ones that adopt a variation of tit-for-tat always win out in the end. It doesn't surprise me that there was a selection pressure among humans for empathy & cooperation.
What's unhealthy, IMO, is the kind of altruism that says you have a moral obligation to help people, just because they say so. There's a subtle difference between making a long term investment in the well-being of those you value, and willingly playing host to a parasite.
Long-term cooperation requires a certain level of brainpower, since you have to be able to remember who you've interacted with in the past and who's done whom wrong, & who owes whom a favor. And putting yourself in the other person's shoes (empathy) also requires you to be able to step back & construct a model with yourself & the other person, & relate that model to the real world where you are in it. Which helps explain why only humans use cooperation to such an extreme as we do.
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In "A Tale of Two Cities", a man confesses to a capital crime he did not commit so that another, the true love of the woman HE loves, might go free. He gave his life so that she could be happy. He says on his way to the guiotine "It is a far, far, better thing I do than I have ever done before".
Only humans can think like that, and it is absolutely the WORST thing you can do to spread your genes around. True Alturism is the opposite of what would be expected to exist if humans evolved from animals. Yet it does.
This is an important issue, and evolutionists know it.
I've never read Tale of Two Cities, but from the SparkNotes summary it seems to say that we live in a world where one can't do the right thing without self-immolation. Dickens had a vision of the world as fundamentally a malevolent zero-sum game. Rand observed something similar about Victor Hugo's "78" (IIRC), also about the French Revolution in fact. You can't do the right thing without dying in the process. What a sick sense of life to have!
If Carton really trades places with Darnay soley to ensure the happiness of the woman he loves (by saving her true love at the expense of his own death), then that was a very bad decision. I'd call it an immoral act. Of course, Dickens makes it more interesting by having Darnay be sentenced to death for an unjust reason: The murders committed by his father & uncle which he apparently had nothing to do with.
In that case, Darnay's death would clearly be a terrible miscarriage of justice - one that Carton should have tried to prevent. But still, at the expense of his own death? No, I don't think so. Notice that Dickens had to make Carton into a "drunk, good-for-nothing" person whom is apparently shown by Lucie what he might have been if he hadn't wasted his life. This is the only way he could make Carton's eventual decision even approach believability.
Note to Nebullis: Cooperation is in our long term self-interest - which is why it's hardwired!
Cooperation is in the interest of the group and may or may not result in long-term reciprocation for the self. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, selfish action always results in an immediate and greater return to the individual. Cooperation results in a reduced return which is not immediate or even certain; it depends entirely on the action of others—it’s no wonder that society has built in a moral obligation for this reciprocation.
Even when unemotional software agents play the Prisoners' Dilemma (the recurring kind where you'll be encountering the same players in the future), the ones that adopt a variation of tit-for-tat always win out in the end.
In this study, when humans played against the unemotional software agents, humans chose non-cooperative behavior.
It doesn't surprise me that there was a selection pressure among humans for empathy & cooperation.
I’m sure there is a good reason for empathy and cooperation, but it is not as immediately obvious to me, especially in the context of kin selection and the distructive hostility to non-kin. This seems to me non-adaptive behavior for the species as a whole.
What's unhealthy, IMO, is the kind of altruism that says you have a moral obligation to help people, just because they say so.
It makes perfect sense to me, as the long-term benefit of cooperation is dependent on the reciprocal behavior of others. I’m inclined to think it’s codified natural behavior.
There's a subtle difference between making a long term investment in the well-being of those you value, and willingly playing host to a parasite.
It’s not given to the players in the Prisoner’s Dilemma whether the other player is a parasite or not. That is, cooperation occurs even with the expectation that the other player might be a parasite. ( I’ll submit that playing may trick the normal evolutionary strategy of players who possibly assume that any other player is a member of the in-group, a group to value.)
In real life, many rounds are played, and the eventual pay-off for the individual is in the long-term benefit of group cohesion and tit-for-tat behavior of others. A common example is a group that lunches together and shares the cost of the meal. The person who habitually underpays or overeats is eventually abandoned or exiled from the group (unless he's so much fun he's allowed to freeload!). However, the apparently obvious long-term disincentive for “cheating” the friends is actually dependent on repeat behavior and group size, as well as other factors. In a large group, the cost of one freeloader to the other individuals in the group is minimal and easily ignored. A one-time freeloader can similarly be unaffected by tit-for-tat removal from the group. In fact, in game theory, the winning strategy in this situation is for the freeloader to pay as the others do until the last lunch at the most expensive restaurant in town.
In voluntary non-contractual situations, the freeloader is simply acting in his own self-interest. There is no force or fraud involved. The other members of the group accept the risk of a non-payer in the decision to share. In fact, the expectation of the other individuals in the group is a shared burden of uneven payment or eating on the part of some.
If nobody cooperates, nobody wins. If only one or a few don’t cooperate, they win big. The incentive for the one-time freeloader is enormous. It is a winning strategy for the individual at a cost to the group. If everybody cooperates, it comes at a determined cost to the individual, a benefit to the group, and an indirect, uncertain, long-term gain to the individual. The shared well-being of the group comes at a cost to the individual and is dependent on the behavior of others in the group as well as group size, number of interactions with the group and other parameters.
So, cooperation is not so obviously in the interest of the individual (long-term or short-term) as you make it sound.
Long-term cooperation requires a certain level of brainpower, since you have to be able to remember who you've interacted with in the past and who's done whom wrong, & who owes whom a favor.
Coooperation does require a certain level of brainpower, but it’s not, necessarily, to keep tally in the way you describe. The overall best interest of the group is the reward for cooperation. This may or may not result in a direct reciprocation to the individual. As the behavior of players in the Prisoner’s Dilemma points out, cooperation is altruistic in the sense that the reciprocation is not certain even though the cost is. It is really not a value transaction for the individual.
Would numbers make any difference? In other words, what if one innocent person chose to die so that 1,000+ others could have a chance to live- Would that person have made a moral or immoral decision?
I am curious as to your opinion on these questions.
Precisely. It's the free-rider problem that, IMO, is the most serious defect of a fully libertarian society, and the easiest way to see it is when considering national defense.
Presumably, since there is no coercive mechanism for funding defense, defense is a fully voluntary, cooperative effort. But the free-rider performs a simple sort of mental calculus - I can, he realizes, get the benefits of defense without actually paying for it. After all, society can hardly leave my house selectively undefended when it is planted right among a whole load of other folks who are paying for defense. So I don't pay, and yet I receive the benefits anyway.
Of course, the system breaks down when enough people do the same calculation and thereby refuse to fund defense. In a sense, the flaw of a hard-core libertarian society is that it relies on people to rationally act in their individual self-interest, except when it comes to something like national defense, where the game changes and people are suddenly supposed to think in terms of the common good. But then again, if people acted consistently acted altruistically, for the common good, communism would work just fine. But they don't, and it doesn't.
There are some people who argue that all interactions involve a net benefit to the individual. Applied to this case, who's to say that Carton didn't consider giving his life as the greatest gain for himself? That the blissful moments walking to the guillotine weren't for him the nirvana he had searched for all his life? That he didn't reach maximum benefit for himself and for those he loved?
It seems to me, however, that there is a transition from a direct value interaction, the straightforward Randian human interaction, to one of expected value, a switch from certain value to one of probability with a time lag. This would properly fall in the range of cooperation or reciprocal altruism. There is a further transition from cooperation to altruism where there is no value inherent in the interaction because there is no expectation of return. One example of this is raising children. Carton also falls into this group. Thus, those who argue that this is still self-interest do so on the basis that the perceived benefit in such a transaction is an affective or psychological gain. This may or may not be valid, it is still a non-value transaction and isn't governed by the marketplace.
People are constantly balancing their own self-interest against the interests of others and society as a whole, and they are inherently unpredictable about which one they will choose in a given situation. Therefore, any system that relies on people to consistently choose one over the other, self-interest or altruism, is basing its future on a wholly unsupported proposition.
I think libertarians are hardwired in the same way everybody is hardwired. Exceptions are distributed across the whole political spectrum; they are not concentrated in any particular political group.
The natural tendency to altruism in practice leads to behaviors which benefit the common good at certain expense to the individual. But it depends on the cooperation of other individuals. This is codified in morality or in law such as taxes for common government or common defense. But there are examples farther afield, such as a national highway system, where libertarians often break with conservatives, but which provide a good argument that the common good benefits the individual more than an individually directed effort ever could.
At #30 you claimed 'reliance on self-interest' to be a flaw in a libertarian society.
It's not a failing of libertarians, it's a part of the human condition. In a fully libertarian society, the society must rely on the altruism of all or most of its members in certain situations - I merely suggest that this is a rather risky supposition.
Not so;
--- In a constitutional republic, which is the prefered government form of libertarians.
--- Wouldn't you agree?
And not because of libertarian nature, but because of human nature.
Yep, guess it is human nature to over-generalize about the political motives of those they oppose.
People are constantly balancing their own self-interest against the interests of others and society as a whole, and they are inherently unpredictable about which one they will choose in a given situation.
Therefore, any system that relies on people to consistently choose one over the other, self-interest or altruism, is basing its future on a wholly unsupported proposition.
I've seen no libertarian system that so proposes. - Have you?
I think libertarians are hardwired in the same way everybody is hardwired. Exceptions are distributed across the whole political spectrum; they are not concentrated in any particular political group.
Your baiting 'cooperation' comment to libertarians at #1 belies your comment here.
The natural tendency to altruism in practice leads to behaviors which benefit the common good at certain expense to the individual. But it depends on the cooperation of other individuals. This is codified in morality or in law such as taxes for common government or common defense.
Libertarians do not oppose a common constitutional government. - Like the one we orginally had. -- Why do you think otherwise?
But there are examples farther afield, such as a national highway system, where libertarians often break with conservatives, but which provide a good argument that the common good benefits the individual more than an individually directed effort ever could.
'Conservatives' like you, use such examples of radical big 'L' thought to divert attention away from the socialistic aspects of the 'common good'. Why is that?
Oh, but you do understand the distinction between human nature and political opinions, don't you? My "baiting comment" points to the essence of the article, that cooperation is hard-wired. I direct the comment to libertarians because they often deny, or do not allow altruism as a legitimate basis for morality or law, while they do allow direct and simple self-interest as a legitimate basis for morality or law.
'Conservatives' like you, use such examples of radical big 'L' thought to divert attention away from the socialistic aspects of the 'common good'.
Certainly there is a socialistic, or, if you will, a statist aspect to the idea of the common good. Common defense is socialistic or statist. That, per se, is not unlawful or 'bad'
In other words, what if one innocent person chose to die so that 1,000+ others could have a chance to live- Would that person have made a moral or immoral decision?
Assume that other person had a 'good life'. IE- they were not a useless drunk like Carnton in the story.
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