Shocking discovery? Money earned by exploitation is less reward... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/may/01/shocking-dis...

Shocking discovery? Money earned by

exploitation is less rewarding, study shows
Experiment involving theoretical financial reward in exchange for uncomfortable
electric shocks on self or others reveals brain preference for less pain and lower profit

Participants in a University College London study were asked to make choices over electric shocks for nancial gain.
Photograph: Larry Gilpin/Getty Images

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent

Monday 1 May 2017 16.00BST

Its the age-old question: does money buy happiness? The answer, according to
scientists, depends on how you make your fortune.

A new study has found that ill-gotten gains elicit a weaker response in the brains reward
system than money that has been earned scrupulously. The ndings could explain why
most of us are reluctant to exploit others for nancial gains.

Molly Crockett, who led the work at University College London, said: Our results
suggest the money just isnt as appealing.

However, the experiment also revealed a handful of outliers perhaps mirroring the
spectrum of moral integrity seen across society who found it equally, if not more,

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gratifying to prot at the expense of an anonymous partner.

The study distilled the complex issue into a single tractable question: would you rather
be paid to receive electric shocks yourself or would you prefer someone else to take the
pain for you and if so, by how much?

The experiment, described in the journal Nature Neuroscience, involved 56 pairs of

participants who were randomly assigned the role of either decider or receiver.

The deciders job was to chose between two options, each giving a number of electric
shocks and a price tag. For instance, 10 shocks for 10, or 20 for 11?

Half of the time, decisions related to shocks that would be inicted on the decider, and
half for the receiver but the decider would always get the money. Just one of the
deciders choices would be selected at random and enacted at the end of the study and
the pain was designed to be uncomfortable, not excruciating.

We can measure how much money is required to shock the other person and how much
they require to shock themselves and take the dierence between those two quantities,
said Crockett.

On average, people required an extra 17p per shock to punish their anonymous partner,
but one third of the participants bucked the altruistic trend and were more eager to spare
themselves.

The deciders weighed up the options while lying inside an MRI scanner, which revealed
a brain network including the striatum, a structure deep inside the brain, which is
known to be key to value computation.

The brain scans revealed the internal values each person assigned to avoiding shocks
and sparing their partner and this activity closely matched the choices made in the
experiment.

A second brain region, called the lateral prefrontal cortex, appeared to be factoring guilt
into decision-making by downgrading the value of a reward when it conicted with
moral feelings about hurting others for prot. This area was most active in trials that
involved inicting pain for a small prot.

It seemed that the worst kind of choice you can make is inicting a lot of pain for a tiny
amount of money, said Crockett, who is now based at the University of Oxford. Twenty
shocks for 10p seems worse somehow than delivering the same for 20.

The researchers are now hoping to study moral decision making in contexts that are
closer to real life. The latest study, Crockett said, involved a fairly black or white
situation.

In our daily lives theres a lot more grey area on the benets to ourselves versus the
costs to another person, she added. Its within this grey area that a lot of moral failure
happens. We want to nd where those boundaries are.

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Topics
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