In economics, an exchange has an obvious value: You pay $2.59 and you get eggs. We call this the price. But in behavioral economics, it can be hard to price an exchange. What’s the value of a good deed? What’s the price of selfishness? If selfishness and generosity have equally large but opposite results, are they “priced” equally?
Psy-Op: Hands and Feet
Sit at the edge of a chair, lift your right foot, and spin your foot at the ankle in clockwise circles. Keep spinning. Now draw an imaginary “6” in the air with your right hand. Did your foot change directions?
Wait a minute: Economics? Behavior? Game theory? This sounds like a job for the University of Chicago! Indeed. In their quest to discover how we respond to generosity and selfishness and thus save us from the evil Lex Luthor, UC Supersleuths administered a series of giving and taking games on unsuspecting undergrads and the Chicagoan population at large.
In the first game, undergraduates played a giving game in which another player (actually a computer) generously gave each participant $50 of the computer’s initial $100. In the next round, students started with $100 and decided how much to give the other player (the computer). On average they gave $49.50.
Genius Tester #13: Gender Bias
In a certain country, boys are preferred. A couple will have children until they have a boy, at which point they stop having children. What is the proportion of boys to girls in this country?
And so one good turn deserves another (minus only fifty cents).
Another group started with the $100 and the other player (computer) took away $50. Economically, this is exactly the same: In both cases the student was left with $50 after the first round. But in the following round, students took an average of $58 from the computer. Ha! That’ll teach ’em to take away my money!
And so one perceived bad turn deserves another. And the response has eight bucks of added spite.
Great. But what happens in life, when we often get more than one turn each?
The intrepid UC Supersleuths recruited people from the mean streets of Chicago and assigned them seven rounds of either the giving or the taking game. This time people played face-to-face, mano a mano. In the first round, one player was secretly assigned to give or take $50, just as the computer had done. But in subsequent rounds, it was no holds barred for all.
What they found is cool: After multiple rounds of the giving game, players established trust and actually began giving more than they kept, expecting the same in return the next round (implying there may be hope for the human race).
But as the game continued, players got increasingly greedy (and/or distrustful), working up to taking an average of $67 by the seventh round. Yikes.
In the next game, undergrads played one round of the giving or taking game, with one player assigned to be stingy (giving only $30 or taking $70), fair (giving or taking $50), or generous (giving $70 or taking $30). How would the other player respond? In fact, our aversion to having our stuff filched is so strong that the first player was seen as more generous when giving $30 than they were when taking $50.
But dammit Jim, what do all these games mean? For one, they demonstrate how failure to put the toilet seat down can quickly escalate to sleeping in the garage. Or how a cross-border skirmish can result in the whacking of the infamous red button. But it also implies that humanity must be fairly nice—if selfish actions have bigger consequences than fair or generous actions, in order to stay at equilibrium, we must be performing more generous than selfish actions.
The UC researchers also posit an evolutionary mechanism for “you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours, but if you take my eye, I’ll take both of yours,” pointing out that this framework gently steers toward fairness and generosity (prosocial actions), while quickly and harshly correcting antisocial behavior.
Zen Mind
A monk asked Zhaozhou to teach him.
Zhaozhou asked, “Have you eaten your meal?”
The monk replied, “Yes, I have.”
“Then go wash your bowl,” said Zhaozhou.
At that moment, the monk was enlightened.
The goal of interrogation is to produce truthful memories. But researchers show that extreme stress (i.e., torture) has exactly the opposite effect: Repeated stress harms memory storage areas in the frontal lobe and encourages the formation of false memories. And stress releases hormones that bind to receptors in the hippocampus, blocking its ability to retrieve stored memories.