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."
Ah! Statistics was very easy for me. Thus I majored in it. Even though I went to a supposed party school, UC-Santa Barbara, I could never find any parties. I was too much of a prude and no one wanted to invite me, I guess. LOL! Where did you find all the parties?
Letter
Nature advance online publication; published online 18 January 2006 | doi:10.1038/nature04271
Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others
Tania Singer1,2, Ben Seymour1, John P. O'Doherty3, Klaas E. Stephan1, Raymond J. Dolan1 and Chris D. Frith1
It's a letter, not a whole article apparently. Someone who wrote the story linked in comment 45 apparently talked to the Nature letter authors, and they discussed the nucleus accumbens activity in males.
Then again, it may be nothing but the hunting instinct and the ancient pleasure of a successful kill and the anticipation of an ensuing full belly. I tend to be suspicious of psychological tests that investigate the primitive nature of man in a modern context.
I would like to see a similar form of this study done with women and shoes and men and a hamburger. Interesting? Maybe. Conclusive? Not likely.
Sorry, but it's a pdf. format.
Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived fairness of others
The contrast images were then entered into one-sample t-tests, separately for female and male subjects, to instantiate random-effects group analyses28,29.
Justice is the right word. Good comment.
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