CONNECTIONS: Why Fairness Feels Good

Okay, here's the game: There's a pot of money, maybe $10 or $20, that you can divide in any way you want with a stranger. The stranger can accept or reject your offer, but there can be no negotiation. If the stranger rejects your offer, neither of you gets any money.
Whatever you offer the stranger is a windfall, so a strict utilitarian would take any amount of money and run. But that's not what happens. Offering the stranger $5 out of $10 is considered fair, but offering $5 out of $20 is not. What UCLA psychologist Golnaz Tabibnia and his colleagues wanted to know was if there is something inherently rewarding about being treated decently.
So the researchers scanned several parts of participants' brains while the participants were in the act of weighing both fair and miserly offers. Consistent with previous results, the researchers found that a region of the brain (the anterior insula) previously associated with such negative emotions as moral disgust was activated during unfair treatment. They also found that regions (including the ventral striatum) associated with reward were activated during fair treatment.
As reported in the April '08 issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the brain finds self-serving behavior emotionally unpleasant, but a different bundle of neurons finds genuine fairness uplifting. What's more, these emotional firings occur in brain structures that are fast and automatic, so it appears that the emotional brain overrules the more deliberate, rational mind. Faced with a conflict, the brain's default position is to demand a fair deal.
Furthermore, when the scientists scanned the brains of those who were "swallowing their pride" for the sake of cash, they found a distinctive pattern of neuronal activity. It appears that the unconscious mind can temporarily damp down the brain's contempt response - in effect, allowing the rational, utilitarian brain to rule, at least momentarily.
Stephen Kiesling