Name: The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule
Author: Wilson, Edward O.
ISBN: 9781932594270

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The Neuroscience of Fair Play: Why We (Usually) Follow the Golden Rule

by Donald W. Pfaff
foreword by Edward O. Wilson

Dana Press, 2007
Cloth: 978-1-932594-27-0 | eISBN: 978-1-932594-32-4
Library of Congress Classification QP360.P4625 2007
Dewey Decimal Classification 174.2968

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | EXCERPT

ABOUT THIS BOOK

We remember the admonition of our mothers: “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” But what if being nice was something we were inclined by nature to do anyway? Renowned neuroscientist Donald Pfaff upends our entire understanding of ethics and social contracts with an intriguing proposition: the Golden Rule is hardwired into the human brain.

Pfaff, the researcher who first discovered the connections between specific brain circuits and certain behaviors, contends that the basic ethics governing our everyday lives can be traced directly to brain circuitry. Writing with popular science journalist Sandra J. Ackerman, he explains in this clear and concise account how specific brain signals induce us to consider our actions as if they were directed at ourselves—and subsequently lead us to treat others as we wish to be treated. Brain hormones are a part of this complicated process, and The Neuroscience of Fair Play discusses how brain hormones can catalyze behaviors with moral implications in such areas as self-sacrifice, parental love, friendship, and violent aggression.

Drawing on his own research and other recent studies in brain science, Pfaff offers a thought-provoking hypothesis for why certain ethical codes and ideas have remained constant across human societies and cultures throughout the world and over the centuries of history. An unprecedented and provocative investigation, The Neuroscience of Fair Play offers a new perspective on the increasingly important intersection of neuroscience and ethics.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Donald W. Pfaff is professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Behavior at the Rockefeller University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the author of sixteen books.

REVIEWS

"Our brains do more than reason and think. They are also home to ancient processes of fear, aggression, love, and affection. In lucid prose, an eminent neuroscientist explains how emotions guide human morality, thus breaking with centuries of emphasis on rationality."--Frans de Waal, author of Our Inner Ape

— Frans de Waal

"The Neuroscience of Fair Play is a highly readable and insightful look at brain systems that mediate aggression, fear, compassion, love, judgment, and decision making and determine how we behave, either according to the Golden Rule or otherwise. Donald Pfaff is a pre-eminent neuroscientist with the breadth of knowledge and depth of thinking that enables him to move easily between molecules and complex behaviors. He also has a rare ability to explain science in an entertaining and highly understandable way."--Bruce S. McEwen, professor and head of the Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University and author of The End of Stress As We Know It

— Bruce S. McEwen, MD

"His sections on parenting, sexual love and aggression are intriguing . . . appeals primarily to those with a strong interest in the brain and the science of behavior."--Publishers Weekly

— Publishers Weekly

"Every religion delivers the golden rule, sometimes as DO unto others, and at other times as DON'T do to others. Given this universality, it would surely be insanity to argue that the golden rule is a cultural construct! Pfaff gives us the clear alternative: the golden rule is part of human nature, part of what evolution handed off as one of our essential moral building blocks. Read this book and enjoy a masterful tour of how your brain computes moral rights and wrongs in the service of creating a fair society."--Marc Hauser, Harvard College Professor and author of Moral Minds

— Marc Hauser

"Donald W. Pfaff, a leading researcher in this intermediate field, delivers a crystal-clear tour through the relevant technical intricacies of the science. The ideas that emerge are among the most important in their relevance to human affairs."--Edward O. Wilson, from the Foreword

— Edward O. Wilson

“This new theory is elegant in that it eliminates the need for complex altruism circuits in the brain. . . . He has succeeded in advancing a testable theory that he and other neuroscientists can start to untangle in the lab. If he is right, it could turn out that the Golden Rule isn’t merely religious teaching. It could be encoded in the very circuitry of our brains.”—Kurt Kleiner, Scientific American Mind

— Kurt Kleiner, Scientific American Mind

"Pfaff marshals a vast number of different kinds of studies to buttress his premises and sustains a persuasive argument throughout."--Boston Globe

— Barbara Fisher, Boston Globe

"Offers a thought-provoking account of how far modern neuroscience has come in explaining aspects of the human condition that have historically fallen exclusively under the domains of nonscientific disciplines, such as philosophy or religion. . . . He concludes by offering some timely suggestions for applying the ideas outlined in the book to solving some of society's social ills. . . . The overall message is powerful. . . . This would be an excellent resource to use in an interdisciplinary course on morality or ethics. Recommended."—C.A. Lindgren, Choice

— C. A. Lindgren, CHOICE

"For those interested in the biology of behaviour in human and non-human animals, Pfaff provides a feast of tightly woven facts. . . . Although there is substantial variation across people in the mechanisms supporting fair play, Pfaff argues persuasively that nearly all humans have the capacity for empathy and this is an essential component of our human nature."—Paul J. Zak, Times Higher Education Supplement

— Paul J. Zak, Times Higher Education Supplement

“The Neuroscience of Fair Play successfully highlights important issues in a young field of inquiry.”--Science

— Prashanth Ak, Science

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction Chapter 1. The Subway Story Chapter 2. The Golden Rule Chapter 3. Being Afraid Chapter 4. Inside the Cell, Fear Itself Chapter 5. Shared Fears, Shared Fates Chapter 6. The Sociable Hormone Chapter 7. Sex and Parental Love Chapter 8. The Urge to Harm Chapter 9. Murder and Other Mayhem Chapter 10. Balancing Act Chapter 11. Influencing Temperament Chapter 12. A New Paradigm Index

EXCERPT
On the “Golden Rule”

Associated with every religious system I have read is a norm known as the Golden Rule. In essence, it requires that I do unto you as I would have you do unto me. This rule is so ingrained in our social behavior as to be intellectually invisible. As a result, we have rarely stopped to question where it came from. If pressed, I might have opined that its origins are lost in the mists of time – for example, when the first high priests figured out how to satisfy a sovereign’s demand for social stability.

But suppose, for the moment, that the Golden Rule is even older, that it is as old as our own biology. Moreover, while it might have acquired all sorts of socio-political decorations over the course of human history, it nonetheless is actually traceable to neuroscientific phenomena that we can identify. If this were so, we could understand why this rule and its many variations have survived in human ethical systems, philosophies and religions. In this book I want to explore a theory of the neuroscientific basis for the instinct toward fair play. I am not talking about religion, because not all statements of this rule are religious in their appearance. Instead, I will try to explain how a discoverable set of brain mechanisms can account for behaviors that follow this rule.

How can I dare try that? It is because complex behaviors do not always require the most complex explanations. For example, we were able to lay bare the biology underlying a sociosexual behavior at a time when we did not understand the simple act of walking….

Ethical behaviors treated as a natural biological development

… Among the first scientists to take up the call were cognitive neuroscientists such as Michael Gazzaniga, whose recent book, The Ethical Brain, anticipates the union of behavioral science with ethics. … Developmental psychologists, as well, have begun to study how a moral sense --- a capacity for empathy, for example --- arises early in the life of their human subjects. Children as young as three can make distinctively moral judgments, and by the ages of four or five can distinguish moral rules that transcend social setting. Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist whose thinking dominated this subject for years, took the position that a moral sense simply arose naturally during the early years of childhood in any normal social environment. On the other hand, Lawrence Kohlberg, at Harvard, proposed from his observations that moral understanding develops through a series of well defined stages that are universal. ... William Rottschaefer, at Lewis and Clark College, describes a series of behavioral studies of the development of empathy. Despite differences in detail, all these studies support the position that ethical behavior need not be treated as a purely religious or mystical subject, but is a product of natural causes approachable with scientific methods.

Hard-core neuroscientists have come on board. The late Nobel laureate, physiologist Roger Sperry, decried the traditional resistance to a scientific approach to moral values. ... In his view, social values depend on inherent traits in human nature that, during evolution of our species, have had adaptive value. Further, Sperry was ready to substitute an ethic based in science for mystical, other-worldly frames of reference.

Such a step is not necessarily for my present argument. Neural and behavioral science may not revolutionize ethical theory, but will certainly help to explain ethical behavior.

One of the techniques currently proving useful for exploring the neuranatomy of neural changes during ethically-guided behaviors is functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Tania Singer and her team at the University College of London looked at brain activity while the subject experienced pain and compared it to brain activity while the subject witnessed a loved one suffering a similar pain stimulus. Several brain regions lighted up under both conditions. These probably represent cell groups whose activities are closely asssociated with a feeling of empathy. But other brain regions became active only during the time the subject himself was receiving painful stimuli. Therefore, Singer concluded that only part of the pain signaling pathways could be mediating empathy.

Other fMRI studies, by Joshua Greene and Jon Cohen at Princeton, challenge the longstanding emphasis on reasoning, instead of emotions, in moral judgments. In a pair of notable experiments, Greene and Cohen presented stories to their subjects. The stories posed moral dilemmas – a choice of actions that would kill only one person, for example, versus no action, which would allow five people to be killed. What brain regions were activate during the choices? Some were those traditionally associated with emotional expression. Greene’s work adds the biology of emotions to our developing understanding of neural mechanisms that give rise to our moral judgments….

Future studies will investigate the influences of genomic alterations on ethical behaviors. A simple-minded attempt to locate a ‘god gene’ once drew attention and derision, but that is behind us. Serious work will look at inherited variations in temperament and try to chart mechanisms by which genetic changes could influence behavioral changes. If a single nucleotide base is mutated in DNA region controlling expression of a specific gene, does the alteration in the amount of that gene’s messenger RNA, and thence its protein, influence important neuronal functions ? If the coding region of that gene is perturbed, would that change the chemistry and therefore the functional efficiency of the resulting protein ? Over the next few decades, this kind of painstaking work will document the genetic basis of ethical behavior as a natural development.

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