Social
scientists and psychologists love to have us playing economic games. They
usually give us lots of opportunity to look after our own interests. With games
like the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’ we set ourselves against an individual, but in
the ‘Random Income Game,’ RIG, we play in a group although we make the
decisions individually.
The
RIG has a group who are randomly assigned an income, but the distribution may
be varied. As group members can see what
their colleagues are getting, the may opt to even things up. With multiple
rounds, group composition changes so a bad reputation doesn’t stick.
Dawes
et al have got a group to play the
RIG while sticking their heads in the big magnet to get fMRI scans of which
parts of their brains are working when they are making the decisions (1,2). The
subjects showed an admirable tendency towards an egalitarian distribution of
wealth. They also had some questions to answer that were aimed at their
thoughts on society and how they would split cash with someone else.
All
this allowed the researchers to focus down on the insular cortex as being the
seat of egalitarianism. The insular cortex is thought to be where we are
self-aware and where we judge levels of pain. But, importantly in the context
of this study, it is where our feelings of empathy arise.
As
the US presidential campaign starts to get into serious mode we are due to hear
a lot about fairness and taxes and one can hope that there will be a lot of
insular cortex activity with both the candidates and the voters by November.
- http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120409164307.htm
- http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/04/05/1118653109.abstract
