Posted on 01/19/2006 2:19:55 PM PST by neverdem
Men appear to get greater satisfaction than women from witnessing painful retribution, according to a brain scanner study published today.
This evidence of male schadenfreude, or pleasure at seeing revenge enacted, suggests men may have evolved to be less empathetic than women so they can more easily mete out punishments to help keep society cohesive, speculate the team at University College London.
In the team's study, published today in the journal Nature, 32 volunteers watched actors who had previously cheated them get electric shocks as the UCL researchers monitored what was happening in their brains.
Dr Tania Singer, who led the study, said: "During breaks in the tests you could tell from the body language that both the male and female volunteers did not like the actors who had cheated them. They tried to stay away from them as much as possible."
In women, the same pain regions of their brains were activated when they saw one of the actors get a shock as when they got a shock themselves; it was as if they actually felt the other person's pain.
But in men, these pain areas were not activated and instead, the pleasure centres of their brains lit up, meaning that they got pleasure, or at least satisfaction, from seeing the other person get a shock. "They expressed more desire for revenge and seemed to feel satisfaction when unfair people were given what they perceived as deserved physical punishment," said Dr Singer.
However, men were not wholly unsympathetic. If the person receiving the shock had not previously cheated them, men behaved like women and showed empathetic activity in the pain areas of their brains.
Nor were women indiscriminately sympathetic. The empathy-related activity in their brains was higher for people who had not cheated them.
"These results suggest that fairness in social situations shapes the nature of the emotional link we have to other people," explained Dr Singer. "We empathise with others if they act fairly. But in contrast, selfish and unfair behaviour compromises this empathetic link."
Rather than feeling empathy for people who cheat us, we desire revenge and generally feel satisfaction when cheats are punished. "This has probably been crucial in the evolution of society as the majority of people in a group are motivated to punish those who cheat on the rest.
"This means that people tend to protect each other from being exploited by society's free-loaders, and evolution has probably seeded this sense of justice and moral duty into our brains," said Dr Singer.
The results could indicate a predominant role for men in maintaining justice and issuing punishment in human society, but Dr Singer said that more research was needed to back up this finding before any conclusions were reached.
"We will need to confirm these gender differences in larger studies because it is possible that the experimental design favoured men as there was a physical rather than psychological or financial threat involved."
It's big enough to show fairly significant sex differences for a preliminary study, or I doubt politically correct Nature would have published it. Since the study was done at University College London, a country of socialized medicine and a hurting health system, I'd be surprised if they could afford a sample that was much larger. When I had a simple CT of the abdomen and pelvis, I was charged US$ 1070.
Chloe (24) rocks!
The researcher probably used Bill Murray's methods as demonstrated in "Ghostbusters."
A study with only 32 subjects is statistically worthless.
Are you a statistician? I'm not.
If you have a normal distribution in a population, that may seem to be a tiny sample, but if there is a biphasic distribution according to gender, the results seem intriguing at the least.
Revenge 'more satisfying for men'
When the "fair" players were shocked, both female and male volunteers showed increased activity in the pain-related centres of the pain - the fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices.
When the "unfair" actor received a shock, the women taking part in the experiment showed a similar empathy with them.
In contrast, the male volunteers showed no increased activity in the empathy-related pain areas.
They did, however, show a surge of activity in the reward centre of the brain - the nucleus accumbens.
P.S. When I worked in Quality Control for Wella AG, a medium sized, hair care products company two decades ago, filling weights were usually checked with two dozen samples for each lot whose usual total daily production numbered about 3,000 - 5,000 units.
The reference to the actual article is Nature (DOI: 101038/nature04271). I'm going to the library to see if I can locate the abstract and an associated P value.
Actually I have a masters degree in math/statistics. 32 subjects/ presumably 16 male, 16 females in a paired t-test is a VERY small sample. Like I said, earlier, details of the study should have been revealed before making general statements like this author did. Even though the results were to be published in a peer reviewed journal such as Nature, how do we know this author is reporting the results correctly?
fyi, sample sizes for maintaining Quality Control or SPC (Statistical Process Control) can be different than a required sample size for hypothesis testing especially when inferences such "men are hungrier for revenge" are involved. In reality, in QC, cost is often a factor in determining sample size. In hypothesis testing, statisitical significance is often the determinant.
Which is why probably more women don't like war and getting the needed results through war. Many don't get the necessity of war.
A related issue to this article IMO.
Well thirty years ago I taught stat and studied it fairly extensively. No study would be considered valid with such a small sample. There is simply too much chance that you would not have a random selection with such a small sample.
The test for filing levels is not the same kind of thing.
I am not saying the conclusion is wrong just that it is not based upon a sufficiently large sample.
They did, however, show a surge of activity in the reward centre of the brain - the nucleus accumbens.
Isn't this like getting 16 women with a negative response out of 16 trials, and getting 16 men with a positive response out of 16 trials. By simple chance wouldn't the odds of that be 1 out of 231? Here's the abstract:
Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others
The neural processes underlying empathy are a subject of intense interest within the social neurosciences1, 2, 3. However, very little is known about how brain empathic responses are modulated by the affective link between individuals. We show here that empathic responses are modulated by learned preferences, a result consistent with economic models of social preferences4, 5, 6, 7. We engaged male and female volunteers in an economic game, in which two confederates played fairly or unfairly, and then measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while these same volunteers observed the confederates receiving pain. Both sexes exhibited empathy-related activation in pain-related brain areas (fronto-insular and anterior cingulate cortices) towards fair players. However, these empathy-related responses were significantly reduced in males when observing an unfair person receiving pain. This effect was accompanied by increased activation in reward-related areas, correlated with an expressed desire for revenge. We conclude that in men (at least) empathic responses are shaped by valuation of other people's social behaviour, such that they empathize with fair opponents while favouring the physical punishment of unfair opponents, a finding that echoes recent evidence for altruistic punishment.
This is very elementary statistics. Stat 101. Or even Psych 101 teaches statistical hypothesis testing. It has nothing to do with odds. ;) You might find a more layman's explanation on google or yahoo.com If you'd like, I can explain it a little more. Just let me know. I also taught statisics as a grad student.
http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/stats/t-test.html
http://www.texasoft.com/winkpair.html
I could have used your help the 1st time I took stats. lol
I was going to locate the article in Nature from my University of WA library account and I can't find the specific article to find. This is very curious that they don't list the exact reference. Sounds like MSM to me! If you tell which journal it is, I can locate it.
I was also a TA for a course on math anxiety in women at UCSB. A lot of women can't do math, and a prof there designed a program to help women get over it. I was glad to help them.
Hmm what about that old saying H*ll has no fury like a woman scorned...
Thanks for the links. "Assumptions: The observed data are from the same subject or from a matched subject and are drawn from a population with a normal distribution."
Let me go out on a limb and say that since all the females apparently had no observable change in deoxyhemoglobin at the nucleus accumbens, and all the males did, I don't believe there's a normal distribution here. The dimorphism coincides with a biphasic distribution.
Comment 50 has the link to the story from Nature.
I don't know those physiological terms. A sample of 32/ half men and half women is not necessarily normal. You could not tell because it is so small. Never heard of biphasic before. It is just very suspect to generalize and make an inference to an entire population from such a small sample. That is my point.
I tried that. Maybe the article is too new. I looked up the authors. If you can give me a specific volume and issue. I can find it. Couldn't locate it from the author's name.
I didn't suffer from math anxiety then...it was too many late nights partying and too many skipped classes. Falling behind that far in stats makes it tough to catch up and pass. :-)
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