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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 :-)"
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.
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.
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.