NYTimes.com Article: Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate

[Steve Brant <trimtab@sprynet.com>]

As Dr. Deming said, "Cooperation is the key".  Here's some nice support from
The NY Times.

- Steve Brant


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The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/health/psychology/23COOP.html?ex=102839691
3&ei=1&en=9d232e0f6a82049e

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Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate

July 23, 2002 By NATALIE ANGIER


What feels as good as chocolate on the tongue or money in the bank but won't
make you fat or risk a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission?

Hard as it may be to believe in these days of infectious greed and sabers
unsheathed, scientists have discovered that the small, brave act of
cooperating with another person, of choosing trust over cynicism, generosity
over selfishness, makes the brain light up with quiet joy.

Studying neural activity in young women who were playing a classic
laboratory game called the Prisoner's Dilemma, in which participants can
select from a number of greedy or cooperative strategies as they pursue
financial gain, researchers found that when the women chose mutualism over
"me-ism," the mental circuitry normally associated with reward-seeking
behavior swelled to life.

And the longer the women engaged in a cooperative strategy, the more
strongly flowed the blood to the pathways of pleasure.

The researchers, performing their work at Emory University in Atlanta, used
magnetic resonance imaging to take what might be called portraits of the
brain on hugs.

"The results were really surprising to us," said Dr. Gregory S. Berns, a
psychiatrist and an author on the new report, which appears in the current
issue of the journal Neuron. "We went in expecting the opposite."

The researchers had thought that the biggest response would occur in cases
where one person cooperated and the other defected, when the cooperator
might feel that she was being treated unjustly.

Instead, the brightest signals arose in cooperative alliances and in those
neighborhoods of the brain already known to respond to desserts, pictures of
pretty faces, money, cocaine and any number of licit or illicit delights.


"It's reassuring," Dr. Berns said. "In some ways, it says that we're wired
to cooperate with each other."

The study is among the first to use M.R.I. technology to examine social
interactions in real time, as opposed to taking brain images while subjects
stared at static pictures or thought-prescribed thoughts.

It is also a novel approach to exploring an ancient conundrum, why are
humans so, well, nice? Why are they willing to cooperate with people whom
they barely know and to do good deeds and to play fair a surprisingly high
percentage of the time?

Scientists have no trouble explaining the evolution of competitive behavior.
But the depth and breadth of human altruism, the willingness to forgo
immediate personal gain for the long-term common good, far exceeds behaviors
seen even in other large-brained highly social species like chimpanzees and
dolphins, and it has as such been difficult to understand.

"I've pointed out to my students how impressive it is that you can take a
group of young men and women of prime reproductive age, have them come into
a classroom, sit down and be perfectly comfortable and civil to each other,"
said Dr. Peter J. Richerson, a professor of environmental science and policy
at the University of California at Davis and an influential theorist in the
field of cultural evolution. "If you put 50 male and 50 female chimpanzees
that don't know each other into a lecture hall, it would be a social
explosion."

Dr. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and colleagues recently presented
findings on the importance of punishment in maintaining cooperative behavior
among humans and the willingness of people to punish those who commit crimes
or violate norms, even when the chastisers take risks and gain nothing
themselves while serving as ad hoc police.

In her survey of the management of so-called commons in small-scale
communities where villagers have the right, for example, to graze livestock
on commonly held land, Dr. Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University found that
all communities have some form of monitoring to gird against cheating or
using more than a fair share of the resource.

In laboratory games that mimic small-scale commons, Dr. Richerson said, 20
to 30 percent have to be coerced by a threat of punishment to cooperate.

Fear alone is not highly likely to inspire cooperative behavior to the
degree observed among humans. If research like Dr. Fehr's shows the stick
side of the equation, the newest findings present the neural carrot - people
cooperate because it feels good to do it.

In the new findings, the researchers studied 36 women from 20 to 60 years
old, many of them students at Emory and inspired to participate by the
promise of monetary rewards. The scientists chose an all-female sample
because so few brain-imaging studies have looked at only women. Most have
been limited to men or to a mixture of men and women.

But there is a vast body of non- imaging data that rely on using the
Prisoner's Dilemma.

"It's a simple and elegant model for reciprocity," said Dr. James K.
Rilling, an author on the Neuron paper who is at Princeton. "It's been
referred to as the E. coli of social psychology."

>From past results, the researchers said, one can assume that neuro- imaging
studies of men playing the game would be similar to their new findings with
women.

The basic structure of the trial had two women meet each other briefly ahead
of time. One was placed in the scanner while the other remained outside the
scanning room. The two interacted by computer, playing about 20 rounds of
the game. In every round, each player pressed a button to indicate whether
she would "cooperate" or "defect." Her answer would be shown on-screen to
the other player.

The monetary awards were apportioned after each round. If one player
defected and the other cooperated, the defector earned $3 and the cooperator
nothing. If both chose to cooperate, each earned $2. If both opted to
defect, each earned $1.

Hence, mutual cooperation from start to finish was a far more profitable
strategy, at $40 a woman, than complete mutual defection, which gave each
$20.

The risk that a woman took each time she became greedy for a little bit more
was that the cooperative strategy would fall apart and that both would
emerge the poorer.

In some cases, both women were allowed to pursue any strategy that they
chose. In other cases, the non- scanned woman would be a "confederate" with
the researchers, instructed, unbeknown to the scanned subject, to defect
after three consecutive rounds of cooperation, the better to keep things
less rarefied and pretty and more lifelike and gritty.

In still other experiments, the woman in the scanner played a computer and
knew that her partner was a machine. In other tests, women played a computer
but thought that it was a human.

The researchers found that as a rule the freely strategizing women
cooperated. Even occasional episodes of defection, whether from free
strategizers or confederates, were not necessarily fatal to an alliance.

"The social bond could be reattained easily if the defector chose to
cooperate in the next couple of rounds," another author of the report, Dr.
Clinton D. Kilts, said, "although the one who had originally been `betrayed'
might be wary from then on."

As a result of the episodic defections, the average per-experiment take for
the participants was in the $30's. "Some pairs, though, got locked into
mutual defection," Dr. Rilling said.

Analyzing the scans, the researchers found that in rounds of cooperation,
two broad areas of the brain were activated, both rich in neurons able to
respond to dopamine, the brain chemical famed for its role in addictive
behaviors.

One is the anteroventral striatum in the middle of the brain right above the
spinal cord. Experiments with rats have shown that when electrodes are
placed in the striatum, the animals will repeatedly press a bar to stimulate
the electrodes, apparently receiving such pleasurable feedback that they
will starve to death rather than stop pressing the bar.

Another region activated during cooperation was the orbitofrontal cortex in
the region right above the eyes. In addition to being part of the
reward-processing system, Dr. Rilling said, it is also involved in impulse
control.

"Every round, you're confronted with the possibility of getting an extra
dollar by defecting," he said. "The choice to cooperate requires impulse
control."

Significantly, the reward circuitry of the women was considerably less
responsive when they knew that they were playing against a computer. The
thought of a human bond, but not mere monetary gain, was the source of
contentment on display.

In concert with the imaging results, the women, when asked afterward for
summaries of how they felt during the games, often described feeling good
when they cooperated and expressed positive feelings of camaraderie toward
their playing partners.

Assuming that the urge to cooperate is to some extent innate among humans
and reinforced by the brain's feel-good circuitry, the question of why it
arose remains unclear. Anthropologists have speculated that it took teamwork
for humanity's ancestors to hunt large game or gather difficult plant foods
or rear difficult children. So the capacity to cooperate conferred a
survival advantage on our forebears.

Yet as with any other trait, the willingness to abide by the golden rule and
to be a good citizen and not cheat and steal from one's neighbors is not
uniformly distributed.

"If we put some C.E.O.'s in here, I'd like to see how they respond," Dr.
Kilts said. "Maybe they wouldn't find a positive social interaction
rewarding at all."

A Prisoner's Dilemma indeed.


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/health/psychology/23COOP.html?ex=102839691
3&ei=1&en=9d232e0f6a82049e

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company