Society & Culture - Posted by Carol Clark-Emory on Tuesday, January 24, 2012 12:23 - 2 Comments 
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...When the brain refuses to take the cash
"Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives," says psychologist Gregory Berns. "Our findings indicate that it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives." (Credit: EugenP / Shutterstock)
EMORY (US) — Brain images show personal values that people refuse to disavow—even when offered cash to do so—are processed differently than values that are willingly sold.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
“Our experiment found that the realm of the sacred—whether it’s a strong religious belief, a national identity or a code of ethics—is a distinct cognitive process,” says Gregory Berns, director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University and lead author of the study published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Sacred values prompt greater activation of an area of the brain associated with rules-based, right-or-wrong thought processes, the study shows, as opposed to the regions linked to processing of costs-versus-benefits.
Berns headed a team that included economists and information scientists from Emory University, a psychologist from the New School for Social Research, and anthropologists from the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, France.
“We’ve come up with a method to start answering scientific questions about how people make decisions involving sacred values, and that has major implications if you want to better understand what influences human behavior across countries and cultures,” Berns says. “We are seeing how fundamental cultural values are represented in the brain.”
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record the brain responses of 32 U.S. adults during key phases of an experiment. In the first phase, participants were shown statements ranging from the mundane, such as “You are a tea drinker,” to hot-button issues such “You support gay marriage” and “You are Pro-Life.” Each of the 62 statements had a contradictory pair, such as “You are Pro-Choice,” and the participants had to choose one of each pair.
At the end of the experiment, participants were given the option of auctioning their personal statements: Disavowing their previous choices for actual money. The participants could earn as much as $100 per statement by simply agreeing to sign a document stating the opposite of what they believed. They could choose to opt out of the auction for statements they valued highly.
“We used the auction as a measure of integrity for specific statements,” Berns explains. “If a person refused to take money to change a statement, then we considered that value to be personally sacred to them. But if they took money, then we considered that they had low integrity for that statement and that it wasn’t sacred.”
The brain imaging data showed a strong correlation between sacred values and activation of the neural systems associated with evaluating rights and wrongs (the left temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), but not with systems associated with reward.
“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” Berns says. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”
Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups, and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values.
“Organized groups may instill values more strongly through the use of rules and social norms,” Berns says.
The experiment also found activation in the amygdala region, a brain region associated with emotional reactions, but only in cases where participants refused to take cash to state the opposite of what they believe.
“Those statements represent the most repugnant items to the individual,” Berns says, “and would be expected to provoke the most arousal, which is consistent with the idea that when sacred values are violated, that induces moral outrage.”
The study is part of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, titled “The Biology of Cultural Conflict.” Berns edited the special issue, which brings together a dozen articles on the culture of neuroscience, including differences in the neural processing of people on the opposing sides of conflict, from U.S. Democrats and Republicans to Arabs and Israelis.
“As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can’t separate the two,” Berns says. “We now have the means to start understanding this relationship, and that’s putting the relatively new field of cultural neuroscience onto the global stage.”
Future conflicts over politics and religion will likely play out biologically, Berns says. Some cultures will choose to change their biology, and in the process, change their culture, he notes. He cites the battles over women’s reproductive rights and gay marriage as ongoing examples.
The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the National Science Foundation.
More news from Emory: www.emory.edu/esciencecommons
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2 Comments
MyLeftMind
In human organ brain is the most precious organ which helps to direct human body through instruction and direction, therefore every human being activities are totally depend upon human brain. So a strong human thinking depends upon strong brain. Therefore we used to keep our brain more sharp by adding protein, nutrition and vitamin supplements in our diet program.
Not “sacred values,” just hot-button issues
Sacred values? Oh, you must mean EMOTIONAL ATTACHMENTS to issues we’ve argued about for years. Any concept that elicits fear or even strong opinions will fire off the amygdala. The amygdala is linked to both fear and pleasure in humans and other animals. Its main function is emotional and social processing, storing and retrieving memories of emotional events.
No wonder the concept of gay rights makes our amygdala go wild. Lesbian and gay people are desperate for equality, while religious bigots are hell bent on continuing their oppression.
Research participants who reported more active affiliations with organizations, such as churches, sports teams, musical groups and environmental clubs, had stronger brain activity in the same brain regions that correlated to sacred values.
For scientists to call wanting to oppress gays or the desire to restrict the reproductive rights of women someone’s “sacred values” is absurd. The study participants who are religious have probably spent years fuming and arguing about those issues, reinforcing connections in their amygdala that will resurface again and again whenever those topics come up. That doesn’t make those issues sacred, nor does it mean the amygdala is related to sacred values. Just ask those same folks about Jesus’ message of love and you’ll see that the sacred value of loving your neighbors doesn’t rile up their amygdala as much as the idea of gays getting married. That’s because bigotry and hatred are alive and well in some people’s brains.
This isn’t about sacred values; it’s about emotional attachments to political and social oppression. Nothing new here, folks. Let’s move on.