MRI Study Shows We're Wired to Cooperate

ibi writes "The NYT reports that humans apparently have an inborne bias towards cooperation. People who cooperated during standard Prisoner's Dilemma tests registered high levels of activity in the pleasure centers of their brains. This result was the opposite of what the researchers were expecting. (But I bet they were testing students rather than their advisers :-)"

Comments

Well yeah.

[pagercam2]

How could humans have developed a society, the arts and modern civiliation if they wanted to be independant. Of course it feels good to help others and there is security in working as a group, be it cavemen or street kids forming a gang. Humans are social, this seems crazy to assume otherwise. As described in "A Beautiful Mind" which was a pretty good movie but a little too much about mental illness and not the accomplishments of the main character. The main characters "big idea" is that if everyone is out for themselves everyone just ends up fighting each other and everyone looses, if on the other hand you work together and cooperate no one gets the ideal goal but everyone does well and evolution is about survival not being the strongest.

Re:Well yeah.

[perljon]

I absolutely agree. But I hate the, "The whole world could be one big cooperative group, and all the fighting and war would go away" attitude.

Although, we like to clump up into well defined groups and work cooperatively, we also very much like to place these groups into competition with each other. (ie, sports, company market competition, national wars, republicans vs. democrats). The group gives us power, while the competition gives us a purpose.

Which finally leads to my conclusion that the only way world peace would ever exists is if we can compete against some non-earth entity or solve an earth threatening dilemna. (ie, Discovery of Vulcans, world-wide plaque, immenant doom from asteroids, moon/mars colonization, etc.) We have purpose as Americans; however, an organization of terrestrials would have no purpose.

Re:stupid researchers

[bowronch]

It would be interesting to know whether the subjects in the test knew how many rounds there were going to be in the games... If i recall from axelrod, in a finite game the best strategy is to defect at the end...

unexpected?

[bob_jenkins]

I was skimming "Game Theory Evolving", which walks through various hypotheses for why humans act the way they do. That's the result they came up with, that people are programmed to play tit-for-tat. I'm not sure if the initial bias was towards cooperation, but I think it was.

I recall that they found that "homo reciprocans", who does to you what you do to them, matched people's behavior best, even in one-time situations where the other guy would never get the chance to do to you what you did to them. Also found that even a small group such people could survive and prosper in a sea of selfish people by sticking together.

Another result was that people model every situation as analogous to previous situations, and they treat one-time psychological experiments as "us against them", where "them" is the researchers.

Female only study....

[jsimon12]

Uh does this really say much about mens brains? The study was entirely female, other studies have shown that mens and womans brains are very differnt.

How much is that pleasure worth?

[rtstyk]

It would be most interesting to find at what price level would the cooperation break down. What if defecting brought $1000, mutual cooperation $100 and mutual defection $25?

Changing the reward structure will completely alter the game. It will also show another dimension to the problem. When the stakes are low it maybe that the pleasure derived from cooperating is taking over but what about when it's more? What about when it's life and death?

I wonder...

If everyone behaved like you...

[ehud42]

It's obvious that if everyone cooperates, the group as a whole benefits. However, once you understand the behaviour required for the group to suceed, and if the group is large enough and the defectors small enough, then the defectors can easily win big.

Take driving for example. We have a major road running from the downtown to the outskirts of our city that is 4 lanes wide (most of the time). The curb lane allows for parking during the day but not during rush hour. So it should be open during rush hour, however, there is always a car stopping or parking or a city bus is lumbering along. The congestion that arises from large numbers of vehicles constantly trying to merge from 4 to 3 lanes would reak havoc on the overall system, therefore the most effecient strategy for the masses is to stick to just 3 lanes.

The speed limit is 60kph. During rush hour, the actual speed in the 3 lanes when volumes get heavy is more like 50kph. With the open lane (parking lane - or as I like to call it, the Express Lane), you can easily do 70 - 80kph (interesting side note: I've been driving this route for years without ever seeing anyone pulled over during the rush hour). However, if too many people 'defect', the average speed in the Express Lane drops to 30-40kph. Do you take the express lane?

Being a defector, most days I am able to get ahead of the masses - saving many minutes off my travel time. The risks? If too many join me, (or if I don't pay attention to slower/stopped traffic ahead of me) there is a dramatic reduction in the average speed. In other words, I can loose big time.

BTW, before I'm flamed as being a offensive / dangerous driver, allow me to explain my 3 priorities for getting home in order of descending importance:

• Get home safely.
• Do not do anything that causes other drivers to have to react defensively.
• Get home as fast as possible.

I'm aggressive, or defensive. I'm assertive.