What Your Brain Looks Like When You're Selling Out
"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" asks the gospel of Mark. Verily, I know not. But in contemplating the sale of his soul for gain, saith this study, such a man doth activate his temporoparietal junction, and also, lo, his ventrolateral prefrontal cortex stirreth, and great is the blood flow therein. And this is of interest because those regions are not very active when people negotiate over a price or do some other calculation of what economists call "utility." So, argue the authors, their research offers evidence that "sacred values" are a different mental experience, with a different basis in the brain, than is haggling over how much money you'd need to swallow a bug or go work for Goldman Sachs.
This matters because of the presumption, still common in policy circles, that humans in conflict can safely be presumed rational actors—people who can and will set a price on their actions. Rational actors seek to avoid losses above a certain level; they want to avoid their own destruction; they can be bought (if not with money, than perhaps with land, jobs, schools or satellite dishes). But part of what makes sacred values sacred, as Gregory S. Berns and his colleagues write here, is that they are enacted without regard to the consequences.
This difference is the basis of the old saw (attributed, as such things are, to Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde and the other usual suspects) about the wit who asks a woman if she would sleep with him for 5 million pounds. After she says she might, he lowers his bid to 5 pounds, and she asks "what kind of a woman do you take me for?" Answer: "Madame, that is established. Now we are haggling over the price." Sacred matters are defined as that which is never haggled over, even at enormous cost, even unto death. Religion. Language. National identity. The land of our ancestors.
For some time now the anthropologist Scott Atran (a co-author on this paper) has been pointing out that this aspect of human psychology is a problem in many political and military conflicts. People defending a sacred value will not trade its incarnation (land, nuclear fuel rods, a city) for iPads, or even for peace. They may be more moved by an apology or some other symbolic concession that brings no economically measurable benefit, but which speaks to their transcendental needs. So a rationalist, supposedly realist, approach, which seeks to find their price, will fail. (And by the way, such people need not be a majority on either side, as even people who would not die for a sacred value will feel themselves bound to honor it when the true believers demand.)
On the other hand, if the rationalist model is right, then "sacred values" are just rhetoric and emotion, covering the usual game of incentives and disincentives. Atran, a resolutely empirical anthropologist, has been gathering evidence for the sacral theory. That's part of the context for this experiment, which was published last March in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.
Obviously, getting people to traduce their values is impossible in modern academia, in part because it would be an evil deed. But Berns et al. came up with an ingenious substitute.
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About Mind Matters
In markets, medicine, justice, politics, psychology, and economics, "Rational Man" is dead. As the science of human behavior enters the post-rational era, we no longer think of ourselves as cool calculators in pursuit of our objective self-interest. Mind Matters is about this change and its effects on how we live. It's about the reasons people perceive, feel, think, and act as they do, and the gaps between what we think we're doing and what research says we're doing. Most importantly, it's about how this sea change affects the institutions we live by: courts, hospitals, governments, stock markets and other entities that still run on the presumption that people act rationally.
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