Justice in the Brain: Equity and Efficiency Are Encoded Differently
Posted: June 10, 2008 
A fascinating article with the title above appeared in a May 10, 2008 report in ScienceDaily. Researchers at the University of Illinois and CalTech led by Ming Hsu asked their subjects inside a fMRI brain scanning machine, “Which is better, giving more food to a few hungry people or letting some food go to waste so that everyone gets a share?” The answers they got clearly bear on RD Theory.
The subjects were asked to make a series of tough decisions about how to allocate food donations to children in a Ugandan orphanage. The subjects were told that each child would start out with a monetary equivalent of 24 meals, an actual gift from the research team to the orphanage. Some meals would, however, have to be cut, that is ‘wasted’, from some children’s allotments. The number of meals wasted and the individual children who would be affected depended on how the subjects selected from trade-off options the researchers presented to them. Every decision option pitted efficiency (the total number of meals given as a proportion of the number originally available) against equity (how equally the burden of ‘wasted’ meals was shared among the children) and ranged from high efficiency with the burden of loss inequitably falling on only a few children, to high equity among children at the cost of more wastage. In RD terms this choice poses trade offs between the ‘waste not’ aspect of thedrive to acquire (dA) resources and the ‘ be fair’ code that goes with the drive to bond (dB). Photographs of the affected children accompanied each option. [This was an essential part of the experiment from our RD standpoint, since dB may well not really go into effect without a face-to-face view of the ‘other’]
The experimental results tend to confirm RD expectations by showing a balance in the subjects’ choices between the two polar opposites with a tilt toward equity. To cite the report, “In these trails, subjects overwhelmingly chose to preserve equity at the expense of efficiency,” Hsu said. “They were all quite inequity averse.”
Hsu further reported that the animation, in conjunction with the fMRI, allowed the researchers to view activity in the brain at critical moments in the decision-making process. After analyzing the data, they found that different brain regions — the insula, putamen and caudate — were activated differently, and at different points in the process. Initially they saw signals in the insula and the putamen. The putamen was responding only to the chosen efficiency, which was how many meals got wasted. The insula, however, responded to how equitably the burden of ‘wasted’ meals was distributed. At the end they saw the activation of the caudate. “The caudate appeared to integrate both equity and efficiency once a decision was made,” he commented.
Hsu explained that the involvement of the insula appears to support the notion that emotion plays a role in a person’s attitude towards inequity since the insula is implicated in the “the awareness of emotions” and the “mediation of fairness.” In terms of RD theory this sounds like the locus of skills that support the drive to bond (dB). While it is by no means clear, the involvement of the putamen regarding efficiency at least raises the question of whether the putamen (in the limbic area) is involved as a skill supporting the drive to acquire (dA). Finally, the activation of the caudate is frequently cited in neuroscience findings as the brain’s way of rewarding the execution of desired or ‘wanted’ behaviors, in this case perhaps the ‘wants’ of both dA and dB.
This fascinating experiment demonstrates how the ingenious experimental designs of cutting-edge neuroscientists and psychologists, using the latest in brain scanning equipment, can throw light on integrative theories, such as the Renewed Darwinian Theory of Behavior!
Tags: Drive to Acquire, Drive to Bond, Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior | 0 Comments »Book Review: Supercapitalism
Posted: February 3, 2008
Robert Reich has written an unusually insightful book about the co-evolution of US corporations and the American government in the last sixty years. Its subtitle encapsulates this story as “The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life.” His last chapter starts with a reprise of his argument: Supercapitalism has triumphed as power has shifted to consumers and investors. They now have more choice than ever before, and can switch ever more easily to better deals. And competition among companies to lure and keep them continues to intensify. This means better and cheaper products, and higher returns. Yet as supercapitalism has triumphed, its negative social consequences have also loomed larger. These include widening inequality as most gains from economic growth go to the very top, reduced job security, instability of or loss of community, environmental degradation, violations of human rights abroad, and a plethora of products and services pandering to our basest desires. These consequences are larger in the United States than in other advanced economies because Americas has moved deeper into supercapitalism. Other economies, following closely behind, have begun to experience many of the same things.
Democracy is the appropriate vehicle for responding to such social consequences. That’s where citizen values are supposed to be expressed, where choices are supposed to be made between what we want for ourselves as consumers and investors, and what we want to achieve together. But the same competition that has fueled supercapitalism has spilled over into the political process. Large companies have hired platoons of lobbyists, lawyers, experts, and public relations specialists, and devoted more and more money to electoral campaigns. The result has been to drown out voices and values of citizens. As all of this has transpired, the old institutions through which citizen values had been expressed in the Not Quite Golden Past [roughly from 1945 to 1970] –industry-wide labor unions, local citizen-based groups, “corporate statesmen” responding to all stakeholders, and regulatory agencies– have been largely blown away by the gusts of supercapitalism.
Reich argues that the trend toward supercapitalism started with technological changes that lowered the cost of global transportation, such as cargo containers on container ships, super railways and highways, and the cost of global communication, the Internet that connected low-cost computers. The globalization that followed led to hyper-competition within industries and even between them, as industry boundaries fell, products proliferated and the bigger firms reached for international supply chains and worldwide customers. This has been great for the consumer and the investor part of us, but is has not been good for the citizen part of us that wants social justice, quality education, affordable healthcare and clean environments for all. He does not blame corporate leaders for putting enough money into the Washington scene to dominate the political process. They feel forced to do it to maintain their competitive position in a game where, if one is not a big winner, one will be a big loser. In RD terms, this game puts so much pressure on one’s drives to acquire and defend that it overrides one’s drive to bond with the wider community.
Reich has done a better job of describing these events than he has in prescribing cures. He provides a sample of promising reform policies for federal legislation but he despairs of getting them enacted. He wishes there was a way to get corporate money out of Washington but sees only hopelessly weak efforts to date. He seems totally unaware of the method we described in Chapter 11 of Being Human for the public funding of all federal elections to a fully-competitive level, the ‘Just $6’ approach. He does make it very clear, however, what a great blessing some such system would be for the public. It could restore the balance in Washington between all four drives that the founders intended (see Chapter 8 of Being Human). He does see that even corporate leaders could welcome regulations that gave all competitors a level playing field, so they could save all the money they now feel forced to send in Washington’s direction. With ‘Just $6” in place regulators could be expected to establish the general rule the all corporations would be expected, as the economists say, to ‘internalize’ all the costs they generate instead of ‘externalizing’ them, as they do now, to their human and natural environment. Such rules would not need to stop economic progress, but the pace would be moderated to enable comparable progress on our widely-shared goals.
Tags: Book Review, Drive to Acquire, Drive to Defend | 1 Comment »
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