How - Dov Seidman [37]
Oxytocin, when produced, does not flood the whole brain. It works on specific regions associated with memory, as well as those that control involuntary functions like breathing, digestion, and heart rate. Amazingly, these brain regions connect powerfully to a different portion of the brain associated with attention and identifying errors in the environment, which in turn sends messages to the decision-making region. In other words, oxytocin influences decision making in a way that is largely outside the realm of our conscious perception.
What can we draw from all this? So much of our thinking about the highly competitive world of global business is predicated on the assumption that maximum profit and success flow from the pursuit of self-interest. Business is war, goes the old saying; the strong survive and the weak fail. We commonly assume that, left alone on a deserted island like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, man would revert to this basic instinct to look out for number one, that we are biologically hardwired to do so, and that we only cooperate with others because the conditions of society demand it. But this assumption may be incorrect. It would seem that humans, at a very early stage of mental development, are hardwired with the ability and desire to connect with and help others, despite the fact that doing so engenders great risk and returns no obvious reward. Moreover, in order to do so, we have an amazing biological gift that allows us to overcome our animal, prerational fear of the unknown.
In light of some of this new thinking about the biological basis of trust and altruistic helping, Paul Zak, chair, department of economics at Claremont Graduate University and adjunct professor of neurology at Loma Linda University, School of Medicine, set out to learn, once and for all, whether maximum profit in fact flows from the pursuit of self-interest, as we have long assumed. Zak is the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies and a leading light in the emerging field of neuroeconomics, the place where economics and the mind meet. Neuroeconomics draws on neuroscience, endocrinology, psychology, economic theory, and experimental economics to try to better understand economic decision making. Zak staged an experiment based on a game theory form called the trust game first used by Joyce Berg, John Dikhaut, and Kevin McCabe in 1995,8 and made some fascinating discoveries that stand conventional thinking about self-interest on its proverbial head.
The basic trust game goes like this: Random subjects are paired up and placed at computers in different rooms, unable to see each other. Each is paid $10 to participate. The first decision makers (DM1s) are told they can send any portion of their $10 to their partner (DM2) and the amount they send will be tripled in DM2’s account; if DM1 sends $4, then DM2 receives $12. The DM2s are told they can then send any, all, or none of the money they receive back to their partner. The money DM1 sends is, in effect, an expression of trust; the amount DM2 returns is an expression of trustworthiness.
The economic thinking prevailing at the time about how each person should play the trust game to achieve optimum profit comes from the work of John Nash, the noted mathematician portrayed by Russell Crowe in the Academy Award-winning movie A Beautiful Mind (based on the biography by Sylvia Nasar).9 His famous formula—called the Nash equilibrium—represents mathematically the correct action to achieve maximum profit in a world of perfect self-interest.10 For Zak’s game, Nash’s reasoning concludes that, if each person acts in perfect self-interest, neither should send the other any money at all; DM1 should send no money because he has no reason to believe that his anonymous partner will return any and to do so would require sacrifice without guaranteed return, and DM2 should not return any because he gains nothing by doing so.
Zak ran this experiment a vast number of times,