Comments on: Craving money, chocolate and… justice

By: Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2 « Neuroanthropology

Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2 « Neuroanthropology — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 00:30:33 +0000

[...] stereotyping) psychology research (for example, Bad brain science: Boobs caused subprime crisis and Craving money, chocolate and… justice). It’s hard to know sometimes whether to just laugh at the stuff or to cry, but when stories [...]

By: Jonathan Kroner

Jonathan Kroner — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 21:19:22 +0000

What seems clear is that there will be few or no simple mechanistic neurological explanations of concepts such as justice. In another New York Times article, The Moral Instinct, 1/13/08 Steven Pinker cited Robert Trivers, who proposed that fairness could be viewed as originating from a suite of moral emotions. “Sympathy prompts a person to offer the first favor, particularly to someone in need for whom it would go the furthest. Anger protects a person against cheaters who accept a favor without reciprocating, by impelling him to punish the ingrate or sever the relationship. Gratitude impels a beneficiary to reward those who helped him in the past. Guilt prompts a cheater in danger of being found out to repair the relationship by redressing the misdeed and advertising that he will behave better in the future.” Each of these emotions ties to different brain functions and are then mediated into behavior through individual experiences within a culture.
As you note, generalizations about “fairness” as they relate to human nature remain elusive. The topics are as challenging today as when Plato wrote his Republic.
Jonathan Kroner, JD, MBA

By: dlende

dlende — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:59:42 +0000

A great post, Greg. With your discussion of social emotions, brain processing, and evolution, I am reminded of something Jim Rilling, neuroanthropologist at Emory, once said to me about trying to imagine 50 chimpanzees cooperating to sit down in a lecture hall and listen to someone speak. Just won’t happen, though adult males will cooperate to hunt. And I agree with you, the basic biological design of these systems, even at the non-human level, is a lot more open than we normally think. Mesolimbic dopamine does all sorts of things, from shaping attention to learning error, and is not simply a hard-wired pleasure circuit, as is often thrown out in both scientific and popular publications.

On a related note, I just found this interesting post from Natural Rationality on altruism and such, where Rilling’s work is discussed: http://naturalrationality.blogspot.com/2007/06/altruism-research-program.html