Justice in the Brain: Equity and Efficiency Are Encoded Differently
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!
Posted on: Tuesday, June 10, 2008 - Tags: Drive to Acquire, Drive to Bond, Darwinian Theory of Human Behavior.
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