Oxytocin is active in evolutionarily old areas of our brain, outside of our conscious awareness. We simply have a sense that sharing with someone who has trusted us is the right thing to do.
We have also found that about 2 percent of undergraduates we studied are pure non-cooperators. When they have an opportunity to share money with a stranger who has trusted him or her, non-cooperators keep all the money rather than share the largesse. The technical term in my lab for these people is "bastards."
Our evidence suggests that bastards' brains work differently. Their character traits are similar to those of sociopaths. They simply do not care about others the way most people do, and the dysfunctional processing of oxytocin in their brains appears to be one reason for this. Because bastards are out there, we still need government and personal enforcement of economic exchange.
Nevertheless, too much government regulation may "crowd out" moral behavior. When every offense has an associated penalty, transgressions cease to be moral violations, but are simply a way for wrongdoers to effectively "use the system" while facing some risk of getting caught and paying a fine.
These external penalties can displace the internal sanctions we feel when we do wrong. At Enron, this was accomplished by breaking down tasks into small chunks so that no one person was ultimately responsible for a decision and could claim ignorance when caught. Former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling excused his behavior at his trial by saying: "I'm not an accountant."
Many people have been convinced that market exchange diminishes our humanity. Think of Charlie Chaplin's film Modern Times, in which the little tramp is literally a cog in the capitalist machine. That view, a residue of Marxist thinking, is wrong. On the contrary, working together, and trading with each other in markets, is morality in action.
Paul Zak is a fellow at the Gruter Institute and director of Claremont Graduate University's Center for Neuroeconomics Studies.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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