Passage 3 Generosity is Natural for Kind-Hearted People
慷慨是一種天性 《新科學(xué)家》
[00:01]Getting into the spirit of giving during the holiday season may seem like a struggle,
[00:08]but it turns out generous people aren't fighting the urge to screw others over,
[00:15]as some have suggested.
[00:17]Instead, generosity - or the desire for fairness - seems automatic
[00:23]and arises from activation in a brain area that controls intuition and emotion.
[00:32]Neuropsychologists define "prosocial" people as those who prefer to share
[00:38]and share alike, and "individualists" as those
[00:43]who are primarily concerned with maximizing their own gain.
[00:48]According to one theory, the difference between these two groups
[00:53]is that prosocial people actively suppress their selfish tendencies
[01:00]with the help of their prefrontal cortex.
[01:03]But Masahiko Haruno of Tamagawa University in Tokyo,Japan
[01:09]wondered if some people might instead have an automatic aversion to inequality.
[01:18]Haruno, along with Christopher Frith of University College London used functional MRI
[01:26]to scan the brains of 25 prosocial people and 14 individualists
[01:33]while they rated their preference for a series of money distributions between themselves
[01:39]and a hypothetical other person. As expected, the prosocial group preferred even splits
[01:48]while the individualists favored distributions where they got the most money.
[01:54]A less predictable finding was that the only brain region that differed in activity
[02:01]between the two groups was the amygdala. When presented with unfair money
[02:08]distributions the activity in the amygdala increased significantly in prosocial people
[02:15]but not in the individualists.
[02:19]To further test if the prosocial aversion to unfairness was automatic,
[02:26]the researchers repeated the test,
[02:29]this time giving the participants a memory task to complete at the same time
[02:36]as they rated the splits.
[02:39]They found that the prosocials' brains still reacted to the unfair distributions,
[02:46]even when the parts of their brain responsible for deliberative processes
[02:52]were taken up by other tasks, suggesting they were not suppressing selfish desires.
[02:59]Carolyn Declerck, a neuroeconomist at the University of Antwerp,
[03:05]Belgium, says the results fit with her own, as yet unpublished,
[03:10]data showing that prosocials seem to be driven by an automatic sense of morality.
[03:19]Haruno will next try to figure out
[03:22]how this difference in the activity of the amygdala arises.
[03:28]It's partly genetic, but also likely influenced by a person's environment,
[03:34]he says, particularly the social interactions during childhood.
[03:41]He says it is interesting to think there might be ways
[03:45]to promote this activity to "realize a more prosocial society."
