cooperate? why, it's my pleasure.

it appears that our brains may be set up to discourage pursuit of short-term gains and selfishness.

brain scans conducted during a prisoner's dilemma game with women indicates that pleasure centers are activated during cooperation. as the game progressed, the women continued to cooperate with other cooperators, likely because of the reinforcing nature of this pleasure circuit. this makes sense evolutionarily - those who continued to cooperate with other honest, cooperating individuals our groups would likely prosper.

interestingly, this process is partly human-specific. when playing with a computer, much less of the reinforcing "pleasure brain" was utilized.

article on the article
more on neural studies in economic games (PDF)

ref: James Rilling, David A. Gutman , Thorsten R. Zeh , Giuseppe Pagnoni , Gregory S. Berns and Clinton D. Kilts. "A Neural Basis for Social Cooperation" Neuron vol. 35 issue 2

Labels: economics, neuroscience