Self interest versus 'moral sentiment' in economic policy

A review by Bowles in Science considers:

...a shortcoming in the conventional economic approach to policy design: It overlooks the possibility that economic incentives that appeal to self interest may diminish ethical or other reasons for complying with social norms and contributing to the common good. It cites one simple example of this happening:

In Haifa, at six day care centers, a fine was imposed on parents who were late picking up their children at the end of the day. Parents responded to the fine by doubling the fraction of time they arrived late. When after 12 weeks the fine was revoked, their enhanced tardiness persisted unabated. While other interpretations are possible, the counterproductive imposition of the fines illustrate a kind of negative synergy between economic incentives and moral behavior. The fine seems to have undermined the parents' sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase.

A clip from the Bowles' discussion:

Although standard in economics, reliance solely on self-interest in the design of policies has never won universal assent. Until recently, however, dissenting views, like Titmuss' celebrated claim that paying for blood donations degrades the willingness to contribute, were thought to lack either empirical support or a coherent account of why separability might fail. But a recent experiment suggests that Titmuss may have been right, at least for women. Other experiments surveyed in this review provide additional evidence that material interests and moral sentiments are not separable in the sense required by the conventional economic approach to policy-making.

Economists, psychologists, and others, in part stimulated by these new empirical data, are well on their way to constructing an economic psychology of the interplay of self-regarding and other-regarding motivation that may eventually enlighten mechanism design and public policy....Good policies and constitutions are those that support socially valued ends not only by harnessing selfish preferences to public ends but also by evoking, cultivating, and empowering public-spirited motives. The modest tax on plastic grocery bags enacted in Ireland in 2002 that resulted in a 94 per cent decline in their use appears to have had just this effect : Carrying a plastic bag joined wearing a fur coat in the gallery of antisocial anachronisms.

Discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds?

In a recent issue of Brain and Behavioral Science (BBS) Penn, Holyoak and Povinelli argue for a profound difference in kind, not degree, between human and animal minds. Their suggestions elicit mainly vigorous opposition as well as some support from an array of commentators. Several of the commentators point out evidence for flexible relational capabilities within a physical symbol system exhibited by dolphins and birds. As I read through the debate and its mind-numbing detail I give up on trying to convey a succinct summary, but here is their abstract. (You might compare this with the work of Hauser et al, that I mentioned in a previous post.):

Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as “one of degree and not of kind” (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds.

Retaliation for unfairness - depends on serotonin

Nature highlights an article by Crockett et al. showing that serotonin modulates our reaction to unfairness. The experimenters:

...temporarily lowered serotonin (5-HT) levels in 20 volunteers and had them play the part of responder in the 'ultimatum game'. The responder can either accept the division of a sum of money offered by the game's proposer, in which case they both get their share, or reject it and deprive both players of the amounts proposed.

Although mood, fairness judgments, basic reward processing, or response inhibition, remained unchanged when players' serotonin levels were lowered, they were more likely to reject unfair and very unfair offers, defined as 30% and 20% of the stake, respectively.

Trust in oxytocin.

I pass on a brief news review by Leonie Welberg from Nature Neuroscience:

The neuropeptide oxytocin is released during childbirth, suckling, touch and orgasm, suggesting that it might have a 'pro-social' function. This idea was strengthened by a recent study in Nature (see my 2/13/06 post, or enter oxytocin inthe search box in the left column of this blog), which showed that an oxytocin nasal spray caused people playing a 'trust' game to retain their trust in a stranger who was looking after their money, even though this trust was violated on many occasions. At the same time, the oxytocin spray decreased activity in the amygdala and the caudate nucleus, brain areas that are involved in the regulation of fear and decision making, respectively.

"We now know ... what exactly is going on in the brain when oxytocin increases trust," says lead researcher Thomas Baumgartner of the University of Zürich, Switzerland. "It seems to diminish our fears." (BBC News, 21 May 2008.) As humans are typically averse to taking social risks, "...a little bit of oxytocin may facilitate carrying on relationships with others," according to Mauricio Delgado, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. (ScienceNOW, 21 May 2008.)

How people in real-life situations develop and retain trust in others is another question, however. "They certainly don't do it by spraying stuff up each other's noses," says Paul Zak of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California. (Science News, 21 May 2008.)

Nevertheless, the findings have implications for understanding mental disorders in which deficits in social behaviour are observed and "...could provide a bridge for potential clinical applications," thinks Delgado (BBC News). An oxytocin spray might help people with a social phobia or autism. "Autistic people also have a fear of social situations and have problems interacting, so it is very likely that oxytocin could help," says Baumgartner. "This hormone seems to play a very specific role in social situations so might be able to improve autism." (BBC News.)

Social cognition in plants?

I suppose it is a bit of a stretch to call it social cognition, but it is recognition of kin and non-kin species, now discovered in plants. This is a bit of a shock, in part because most animals have not even been shown to have the ability to recognize relatives, despite the huge advantages in doing so. Some plants not only avoid competing with kin by not sending roots towards them, but also sniff out their victims. We're talking about careful experiments here, not New Age fantasies about plant feelings and sentience. Check out the account by Yoon. This excerpt is from its ending:

Recent debates have revolved around a longstanding question: which of the abilities and attributes that scientists have long considered the realm of just animals, like sensing, learning and memory, can sensibly be transferred to plants?...At the extreme of the equality movement, but still within mainstream science, are the members of the Society of Plant Neurobiology, a new group whose Web site describes it as broadly concerned with plant sensing....The very name of the society is enough to upset many biologists. Neurobiology is the study of nervous systems — nerves, synapses and brains — that are known just in animals. That fact, for most scientists, makes the notion of plant neurobiology a combination of impossible, misleading and infuriating....Thirty-six authors from universities that included Yale and Oxford were exasperated enough to publish an article last year, “Plant Neurobiology: No Brain, No Gain?” in the journal Trends in Plant Science. The scientists chide the new society for discussing possibilities like plant neurons and synapses, urging that the researchers abandon such “superficial analogies and questionable extrapolations.”

Defenders point out that 100 years ago, some scientists were equally adamant that plant physiology did not exist. Today, that idea is so obviously antiquated that it could elicit a good chuckle from the many scientists in that field...As for the “superficial analogies,” the new wave botanists are well aware that plants do not have exact copies of animal nervous systems...“No one proposes that we literally look for a walnut-shaped little brain in the root or shoot tip,” five authors wrote in defense of the new group. Instead, the researchers say, they are asking that scientists be open to the possibility that plants may have their own system, perhaps analogous to an animal’s nervous system, to transfer information around the body....“Plants do send electrical signals from one part of the plant to another,” said Dr. Eric D. Brenner, a botanist at the New York Botanical Garden and a member of the Society of Plant Neurobiology...Although those signals have been known for 100 years, scientists have no idea what plants do with them...“No one’s asked how all that information is integrated in a plant, partly because we’ve convinced ourselves that it isn’t,” Dr. Brenner said. “People have been intimidated from asking that question.”

Seeing ourselves / Seeing others - built in errors

Emily Pronin writes a review article in Science Magazine to which my first reaction was "Duh... so what else is new?" But as I looked at it a second time my "who needs to write this down, it is just common sense" reaction began to yield to realizing that the sort of systematic list she offers is useful - way in which intrinsic differences in 1st person (introspective, immersed in our own sensations, emotions, and cognitions) and 3rd person perspectives (extrospective, dominated by what behavior can be observed externally) are guaranteed to lead conflicts in judgements of our own and others behavior. Here are a few clips:

Positive illusions. People tend to have inflated views of themselves and their futures. For example, they think that they are more likely to become wealthy, and less likely to contract contagious diseases, than those around them. This unrealistic optimism partially stems from people's attentional focus on their own (but not others') internal desires and intentions .

Interpersonal knowledge. People overestimate how much they can learn about others from brief encounters such as job interviews (10). At the same time, they think others can get only a glimpse of them from such encounters. As a result, people generally feel they know others better than others know them

Pluralistic ignorance. People often misconstrue the thoughts and motives of others. In cases of "pluralistic ignorance," those misconstruals occur even though others share one's own motives and beliefs and act in the same way as oneself . An example... occurs when an audience of people all succeed in concealing their distraction and boredom during a long lecture and they then assume that they are the only ones not interested and engaged. In another example, college students often forgo trying to make friends with students of other races (even though they would like to be friends) because they interpret those others' lack of trying as indicating lack of interest. Both these examples involve people judging others based on overt behavior (e.g., failing to make social overtures) but themselves based on internal states (e.g., wanting friendship but fearing rejection)

Miscommunications. People often fail miserably in their efforts to communicate. These communication breakdowns (whether they involve negotiating peace agreements, giving driving directions, or navigating romantic relationships) often reflect the fact that people know what they intend or mean to communicate, while others focus on what they actually say. For example, negotiators can fail to outwardly express their interest in cooperating, because their internal awareness of that interest (gained through introspection) blinds them to the fact that the other side sees only their behavior, which often lacks clear signs of that motive

Conformity. People are influenced by those around them (and by the mass media) in everything from fashion tastes to political views; but, they generally deny that and see themselves as alone in a crowd of sheep.

Conclusions. It is almost axiomatic that as long as people are in a position to perceive themselves and to perceive others, differences in those perceptions will exist and will engender disagreement, misunderstanding, and conflict. When people judge themselves based on their good intentions but others based on their less-good behavior (or based on cynical assumptions about human nature), they are likely to feel resentful and disappointed over others' failure to meet them halfway. When people view their own perceptions and beliefs as objective reflections of reality but others' as distorted by bias, they are likely to feel frustrated and angry over others' unwillingness to be fair and reasonable. And, such feelings are likely to breed aggression and conflict.

This picture may sound dismal, but there is hope. Misunderstandings can be averted by those aware of the psychological processes involved in self and social perception. Those individuals can be mindful that it is not only their own behavior that is sensitive to the constraints of the situation, but others' as well. Perhaps this could prompt them to show more charity when others fail to meet expectations. Those individuals also can recognize that others' mistakes and errors may not be the result of conscious malice but rather of unintended influences that those others would themselves decry. And, those individuals might remind themselves that there often is a wide gulf between intention and action, but that it is only reasonable and fair to apply the same standard of judgment to others as to oneself. Following these guidelines would not just be socially charitable— it would also be scientifically informed.

Dan Dennett: Ants, terrorism, and the awesome power of memes

My son Jonathan sent me this link to an engaging talk by Dan Dennett given some time ago. I heard it back then, and think it is worth passing on...

Growing new brain cells enhanced by social contact

From the editor's choice section of the May 30 issue of Science, a suggestion that increased social input from a larger number of other animals enhances the survival of new brain cells in brain areas involved in communication:

Out With the Old, In With the New

Might this adage, which some pundits have claimed as the basis for the vernal electoral calamities that have befallen the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, apply equally forcefully to the turnover of neurons in the brain? Adar et al. have performed a painstaking histological and immunofluorescence accounting of the survival likelihoods of newly born neurons in the brain of the zebra finch, a songbird that serves as an animal model for studying innate and learned influences on vocal communication. They focused on the nidopallium caudale (NC) region because it participates in auditory processing and is activated by social stimuli (other songbirds in this notably social species). By varying the complexity of the social environment, they found that the youngest cells--which had recently migrated from the site of their birth and were still becoming integrated, quite literally, as they established syn-aptic connections with existing NC neurons--were more likely to have survived if the bird had been exposed to a large group of male and female birds; conversely, in birds housed with only one other individual, the survival of older (though still relatively young) cells was enhanced. One interpretation of these data is that an increase in demand--in the form of an upturn in auditory/social inputs needing to be processed--acts as a selective pressure favoring the survival of new recruits.

Sarcasm and the right parahippocampal gyrus...

Getting inside someone's else's head to realize when they are ironic, sarcastic, or angry is one of our most advanced 'theory of mind' capabilities. You would expect the brain imaging people to show the frontotemporal lobe to light up when sarcasm is being detected, since one of the early signs of frontotemporal dementia is loss of the ability to detect sarcasm. Hurley describes the work of Rankin and others looking at brain correlates of being able to detect sarcasm based entirely on paralinguistic (non-verbal) cues (check out the link to the videos used).

...magnetic resonance scans revealed that the part of the brain lost among those who failed to perceive sarcasm was not in the left hemisphere of the brain, which specializes in language and social interactions, but in a part of the right hemisphere previously identified as important only to detecting contextual background changes in visual tests....The right parahippocampal gyrus must be involved in detecting more than just visual context — it perceives social context as well....The discovery fits with an increasingly nuanced view of the right hemisphere’s role...The left hemisphere does language in the narrow sense, understanding of individual words and sentences...But it’s now thought that the appreciation of humor and language that is not literal, puns and jokes, requires the right hemisphere.

So is it possible that Jon Stewart, who wields sarcasm like a machete on “The Daily Show,” has an unusually large right parahippocampal gyrus?..“His is probably just normal,” Dr. Rankin said. “The right parahippocampal gyrus is involved in detecting sarcasm, not being sarcastic...I bet Jon Stewart has a huge right frontal lobe; that’s where the sense of humor is detected on M.R.I.”...A spokesman for Mr. Stewart said he would have no comment — not that a big-shot television star like Jon Stewart would care about the size of his neuroanatomy.

Social heirarchy, stress, and diet

I become increasingly convinced over time that much of what runs our behavior is is the same stuff that runs a macaque monkey, with the human self conscious rationalizing overlay mainly being a window dressing. This is why I find numerous bits of work that have emerged from Yerkes Primate Research group (the subject of this and other previous posts) so fascinating.

A recent report from Wilson et al. is an extension of work by Seligman and many others that has shown that one's role in a hierarchy, or relative position in a gradient of personal helplessness to power, is a fundamental determinant of individual well being in both animal and human societies. Subordinate individuals show more chronic stress, anxiety-like behaviors, and susceptibility to disease. Wilson et al. show that socially subordinate macaque females consume more high caloric food and weigh more, and feed both during daylight and night (unlike dominants) .

Tierney notes the similarity of this result and the famous Whitehall study of British civil servants, which found that lower-ranking workers were more obese than higher-status workers. Even though the subordinate workers were neither poor nor lacked health care, their lower status correlated with more health problems. He also mentions the experiments of Zellner, who:

...tested both men and women by putting bowls of potato chips, M&Ms, peanuts and red grapes on a table as the participants in the study worked on solving anagrams. Some of the people were given unsolvable anagrams, and they understandably reported being more stressed than the ones given easy anagrams...The stress seemed to affect snacking in different ways for each sex. The women given solvable puzzles ate more grapes than M&Ms, while the women under stress preferred M&Ms. The men ate more of the high-fat snacks when they were not under stress, apparently because the ones who got the easy anagrams had more time to relax and have a treat.

Body odors - brain processing different from similar common odors

Here is an edited paste-up of text and abstract from Lundström et al.

Humans are highly accurate at identifying individuals based solely on their body odors, being able to use signals conveyed in body odor to make accurate kin–nonkin judgments, and to detect minute differences in genetic composition of unknown individuals. While visual and auditory stimuli of high social and ecological importance are processed in the brain by specialized neuronal networks, such specialized processing has not yet been demonstrated for olfactory stimuli. The authors used positron emission tomography to ask whether the central processing of body odors differs from perceptually similar non-body odors as women smelled odors collected from friends and non-friends who had slept for seven nights with tight cotton t-shirts with cotton nursing pads sewn into the underarm area. Body odors activated a network consisting of the posterior cingulate cortex, occipital gyrus, angular gyrus, and the anterior cingulate cortex, none of which is believed to be related to olfactory processing. However, together they form an interesting pattern. Posterior cingulate cortex is known to be active in response to emotional stimuli, whereas the anterior cingulate cortex is believed to regulate attentional efforts. This suggests processing of body odors is similar to what previously has been demonstrated for highly emotional stimuli, such as visual images of snakes, where the posterior cingulate cortex works in concert with the anterior cingulate cortex. A separation in the processing of odors based on their source was observed. Smelling a friend's body odor activated regions previously seen for familiar stimuli, whereas smelling a stranger activated amygdala and insular regions akin to what has previously been demonstrated for fearful stimuli.

The data provide evidence that social olfactory stimuli of high ecological relevance are processed by specialized neuronal networks, just as has been demonstrated for auditory and visual stimuli.

Meeting George Bush versus Meeting Cinderella

The rest of the title of this article by von Cramon and Schubotz is "The Neural Response When Telling Apart What is Real from What is Fictional in the Context of Our Reality." Our ability to distinguish fact from fiction emerges early during our development, and by the age of 5, we not only differentiate reality from fiction but can also distinguish between different fictional worlds. The neural correlates underlying this ability are unknown. The authors obtain fMRI images showing significant difference in brain activity while processing real versus fictional conditions. The graphic is from the paper just to include a pretty picture, I'll spare you the details, because they really don't add all that much to the bottom line:

The processing of real and fictional scenarios activated a common set of regions including medial-temporal lobe structures. When the scenarios involved real people, brain regions associated with episodic memory retrieval and self-referential thinking, the anterior prefrontal cortex and the precuneus/posterior cingulate, were more active. In contrast, areas along the left lateral inferior frontal gyrus (shown in the graphic), associated with semantic memory retrieval, were implicated for scenarios with fictional characters. This implies that there is a fine distinction in the manner in which conceptual information concerning real persons in contrast to fictional characters is represented. In general terms, the findings suggest that fiction relative to reality tends to be represented in more factual terms, whereas our representations of reality relative to fiction are colored by personal subjectivity. What modulates our understanding of the relative difference between reality and fiction seems to be whether such character-type information is coded in self-relevant terms or not.

The authors note their agreement with the statement of William James: "In the relative sense, then, the sense in which we contrast reality with simple unreality, ... reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life

Blogging as self-medication

Maybe I've found one of the reasons I do this blog (other than to keep me off the streets): An article by Jessica Wapner in the June issue of Scientific American discusses studies on the therapeutic value of blogging. Blogging is claimed to provide physiological benefits similar to those that have been shown for expressive writing (serving as a stress-coping mechanism, improving memory and sleep, and boosting immune cell activity.) Blogging may act as a "placebo for getting satisfied." The blogosphere offers an antidote to social isolation. (Checking out my 'mdbownds' YouTube video postings reveals that the Debussy Reverie video has been viewed 98,739 times and 157 comments made; this mindblog gets 500-600 visitors each day. While this is social connection, I totally don't know any of you people, except for a handful of friends.) I find fleeting virtual world contacts a pallid substitute for real life huggable friends, and sometimes fret that my time spent hunkering over a keyboard provides too convenient an excuse for the harder work of being a robust member of real (versus virtual) social groups.

Lacking power diminishes cognitive function

An implication of meritocracies is that individuals who lack power are low achievers because they are less capable or less motivated than those who acquire power. Smith et al. propose, alternatively, that powerless people often achieve less than powerful people because lacking power itself fundamentally alters cognitive functioning and increases vulnerability to performance decrements during complex executive tasks.

In a experiment carried out on 101 Dutch university students, simply assigning each participant to be either a superior or a subordinate in a computer-based task altered their performance on tests of executive function. (Participants were told that the superior would direct and evaluate the subordinate. This evaluation would purportedly determine the subordinate's payment for the experiment, whereas the superior would be paid a fixed amount.) Smith et al. found that the powerless were less effective than the powerful at standard tests evaluating ability to update, inhibition, and planning. Because existing research suggests that the powerless have difficulty distinguishing between what is goal relevant and what is goal irrelevant in the environment, a further experiment was carried out to establish that the executive-function impairment associated with low power is driven by goal neglect.

This work consistent with the idea that the cognitive alterations arising from powerlessness may help foster stable social hierarchies. The results also have implications for management and organizations. In many industries (e.g., health care, electric power), errors can be costly. Increasing employees' sense of power could lead to improved executive functioning, decreasing the likelihood of catastrophic errors.

Rapid orienting to positive, as well as negative, emotional stimuli.

Most of the work on how emotions focus our attention has focused on negative stimuli (snakes, angry faces, etc.) Brosch et al. use ERP measurement to note that our attention also can very reliably be captured by positive nurturance stimuli such as baby faces. The results confirm that biological relevance, and not exclusively fear, produces an automatic spatial orienting toward the location of a stimulus. From the paper:

...we recorded event-related potentials from 20 subjects performing a dot-probe task in which the cues were fear-inducing and nurturance-inducing stimuli (i.e., anger faces and baby faces). Highly similar validity modulation was found for the P1 time-locked to target onset, indicating early attentional capture by both positive and negative emotional stimuli. Topographic segmentation analysis and source localization indicate that the same amplification process is involved whether attention orienting is triggered by negative, fear-relevant stimuli or positive, nurturance-relevant stimuli.

Illustration of the experimental sequence. Each trial started with a fixation cross. Then the cue, consisting of two images presented on the left and right sides of the screen, was presented briefly. One of the two pictures was an emotional face, and the other was a neutral face. Following offset of the face pair, the fixation cross was presented randomly for 100, 150, 200, 250, or 300 ms. Afterward, the target, a triangle pointing upward or downward, appeared for 150 ms in the location of one of the previously presented faces. In a valid trial, the triangle was in the location of the emotional image; in an invalid trial, the triangle was in the location of the neutral image. Some participants were required to respond if the triangle pointed upward, and the others were required to respond if the stimulus pointed downward. SOA = stimulus onset asynchrony.

Your lips in my brain...

The title of the Kriegstein et al. article is: "Simulation of talking faces in the human brain improves auditory speech recognition." It turns out that observing a specific person talking for 2 min improves our subsequent auditory-only speech and speaker recognition for this person. This shows that, in auditory-only speech, the brain exploits previously encoded audiovisual correlations to optimize communication. The authors suggest that this optimization is based on speaker-specific audiovisual internal models, which are used to simulate a talking face. From the author's introduction:

Human face-to-face communication works best when one can watch the speaker's face. This becomes obvious when someone speaks to us in a noisy environment, in which the auditory speech signal is degraded. Visual cues place constraints on what our brain expects to perceive in the auditory channel. These visual constraints improve the recognition rate for audiovisual speech, compared with auditory speech alone. Similarly, speaker identity recognition by voice can be improved by concurrent visual information. Accordingly, audiovisual models of human voice and face perception posit that there are interactions between auditory and visual processing streams

Neurophysiological face processing studies indicate that distinct brain areas are specialized for processing time-varying information [facial movements, superior temporal sulcus (STS), and time-constant information (face identity, fusiform face area (FFA). If speech and speaker recognition are neuroanatomically dissociable, and the improvement by audiovisual learning uses learned dependencies between audition and vision, the STS should underpin the improvement in speech recognition in both controls and prosopagnosics. A similar improvement in speaker recognition should be based on the FFA in controls but not prosopagnosics. Such a neuroanatomical dissociation would imply that visual face processing areas are instrumental for improved auditory-only recognition.

The authors in fact obtained these results when they used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show the response properties of these two areas.

Personality dominance: reflection in brain imaging and spatial attention

Here are two different takes, from the Journals Neuron and Psychological Science on correlates of human dominance hierarchies:
In the Neuron article, Zink et al. monitor the brain activity patters of gamers that form in response to status cues. They set artificial hierarchies by assigning 72 volunteers a skill rank in a computer game that flagged onscreen opponents as superior or inferior players. But the opponents were really computers, and the games and ranks were rigged so that status was only perceived. One finding was that brain regions associated with emotion or pain become busier when gamers are losing to inferior opponents. From their abstract:

....In both stable and unstable social hierarchies, viewing a superior individual differentially engaged perceptual-attentional, saliency, and cognitive systems, notably dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In the unstable hierarchy setting, additional regions related to emotional processing (amygdala), social cognition (medial prefrontal cortex), and behavioral readiness were recruited...social hierarchical consequences of performance were neurally dissociable and of comparable salience to monetary reward, providing a neural basis for the high motivational value of status...results identify neural mechanisms that may mediate the enormous influence of social status on human behavior and health.

The article in Psychological Science deals with our tendency to represent dominance in vertical terms. This tendency is apparent in linguistic metaphor, anthropological data, sociological data, and scientific theories of personality dominance. The ubiquity of such mappings is consistent with the central postulate of the metaphor-representation perspective: that people must draw from the perceptual domain, as reflected in common metaphors, when attempting to represent abstract concepts such as dominance or power. Moeller et al. examine whether dominant personality correlates with performance on vertical versus horizontal discriminations.

Previous research has shown that dominant individuals frequently think in terms of dominance hierarchies, which typically invoke vertical metaphor (e.g., "upper" vs. "lower" class). Accordingly, we predicted that in spatial attention paradigms, such individuals would systematically favor the vertical dimension of space more than individuals low in dominance. This prediction was supported by two studies (total N = 96), which provided three tests involving two different spatial attention paradigms. In all cases, analyses controlling for speed of response to horizontal spatial probes revealed that more dominant individuals were faster than less dominant individuals to respond to probes along the vertical dimension of space. Such data support the metaphor-representation perspective, according to which people think in metaphoric terms, even in on-line processing tasks. These results have implications for understanding dominance and also indicate that conceptual metaphor is relevant to understanding the cognitive-processing basis of personality.

Fairness activates brain reward circuitry.

Some interesting observations from Tabibnia et al. They:

...examined self-reported happiness and neural responses to fair and unfair offers while controlling for monetary payoff. Compared with unfair offers of equal monetary value, fair offers led to higher happiness ratings and activation in several reward regions of the brain. Furthermore, the tendency to accept unfair proposals was associated with increased activity in right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region involved in emotion regulation, and with decreased activity in the anterior insula, which has been implicated in negative affect. This work provides evidence that fairness is hedonically valued and that tolerating unfair treatment for material gain involves a pattern of activation resembling suppression of negative affect.

Figure legend - Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), ventral striatum, and amygdala activation associated with fairness preference. The illustration (a) shows the location of clusters with significantly greater activation in response to fair compared with unfair offers.



Figure legend - Brain activation associated with the tendency to accept unfair offers. The illustrations show the location of areas in (a) left anterior insula and (c) right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (right VLPFC) whose activation predicted this tendency.

The social cognitive neuroscience of business organizations

Jumping on the bandwagon of getting cognitive neuroscience into business and marketing, there is a special issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences which offers one open access article by Klein and D'Desposito, "Neurocognitive Inefficacy of the Strategy Process." Their abstract (written in business-speak gobbledegook, but content can be extracted):

The most widely used (and taught) protocols for strategic analysis—Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) and Porter's (1980) Five Force Framework for industry analysis—have been found to be insufficient as stimuli for strategy creation or even as a basis for further strategy development. We approach this problem from a neurocognitive perspective. We see profound incompatibilities between the cognitive process—deductive reasoning—channeled into the collective mind of strategists within the formal planning process through its tools of strategic analysis (i.e., rational technologies) and the essentially inductive reasoning process actually needed to address ill-defined, complex strategic situations. Thus, strategic analysis protocols that may appear to be and, indeed, are entirely rational and logical are not interpretable as such at the neuronal substrate level where thinking takes place. The analytical structure (or propositional representation) of these tools results in a mental dead end, the phenomenon known in cognitive psychology as functional fixedness. The difficulty lies with the inability of the brain to make out meaningful (i.e., strategy-provoking) stimuli from the mental images (or depictive representations) generated by strategic analysis tools. We propose decreasing dependence on these tools and conducting further research employing brain imaging technology to explore complex data handling protocols with richer mental representation and greater potential for strategy creation.

The social brain in adolescence - a review

In a recent Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore does a summary of changes in the social brain during adolescence and I put down here the slightly edited capsule summary and one summary figure that offers a review of the relevant brain structures:

The 'social brain', the network of brain regions involved in understanding other people, includes the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). These regions are key to the process of mentalizing — that is, the attribution of mental states to oneself and to other people...Recent functional neuroimaging studies have shown that activity in parts of the social brain during social cognitive tasks changes during adolescence... activity in the PFC during face-processing tasks increases from childhood to adolescence and then decreases from adolescence to adulthood. Consistent with this, activity in the mPFC during mentalizing tasks decreases between adolescence and adulthood.

The prefrontal cortex is one of the brain regions that undergo structural development, including synaptic reorganization, during adolescence. Synaptic density, reflected in grey-matter volume in MRI scans, decreases during adolescence...Synaptic reorganization in the PFC might underlie the functional changes that are seen in the social brain during adolescence, as well as the social cognitive changes during this period.


Figure - Regions that are involved in social cognition include the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), which are involved in thinking about mental states, and the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), which is activated by observing faces and biological motion. Other regions of the social brain on the lateral surface are the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the interparietal sulcus (IPS). Regions on the medial surface that are involved in social cognition include the amygdala, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the anterior insula (AI).