Slicing the Economic Pie

I grew up with a brother who was very close to me in age, and we were both hyper vigilant about getting our fair share. No matter what was at stake. That meant no more than our fair share of chores and responsibilities, and certainly no less than our fair share of privileges and rewards. My mother had all sorts of clever tricks for dealing with this constant competitiveness.If we were bickering over a last piece of pie, for example, she would randomly pick one of us to cut the slice of pie in half. But before the cutting started she would add: “And your brother gets to choose the slice he wants.”

Damn. With those few words, she took all the fun out of holding the knife, and indeed she probably shifted the competitive advantage. In any case, she made a muddle of self-interest and fairness in our young minds.

Well, it turns out my mother didn’t invent the pie-slicing gambit. But she was buying into a fairly cynical view of life, assuming that we all act like rational calculating machines, governed entirely by utilitarian self interest. But is this true? Is fairness simply a ruse, something we adopt only when we secretly see an advantage in it for ourselves? And do we expect no more than self-interest of others? Or is there such a thing as fairness for fairness’ sake?

Many psychologists have in recent years moved away from the purely utilitarian view, dismissing it as too simplistic. But the trick is in actually demonstrating genuine fairness in action, uncontaminated by self-serving motives like greed and need. Recent advances in both cognitive science and neuroscience now allow psychologists to approach this question in some different ways, and they are getting some intriguing results.

UCLA psychologist Golnaz Tabibnia and colleagues used a classic psychological test called the “ultimatum game" to explore fairness and self-interest in the laboratory. In this particular version of the test, Person A has a pot of money, say $23, which he can divide in any way he wants with Person B. All Person B can do is look at the offer and accept or reject it; there is no negotiation. If he walks away from the deal, there is no deal. In the actual experiment, there is no real Person A: It’s secretly the experimenter, making a range of offers, from generous to fair to stingy. The experimental subjects get to weigh the offers and respond.

Whatever Person A offers to Person B is an unearned windfall, even if it’s a miserly $5 out of $23, so a strict utilitarian would take the money and run. But that’s not exactly what happens in the laboratory. The UCLA scientists ran the experiment so sometimes $5 was stingy and other times fair, say $5 out of a total stake of $10. The idea was to make sure the subjects were responding to the fairness of the offer, not to the amount of the windfall. When they did this, and asked the subjects to rate themselves on a scale from happy to contemptuous, they had some interesting findings: Even when they stood to gain exactly the same dollar amount of free money, the subjects were much happier with the fair offers and much more disdainful of deals that were lopsided and self-centered. Indeed, many people actually reject very unfair deals, even though they are losing cash out of pocket, suggesting that their sense of decency is trumping their rational, calculating mind. They are responding emotionally to the idea that someone would hoodwink them.

That’s interesting in itself. But it could simply mean that we don’t like being treated shabbily, which wouldn’t be all that surprising. The psychologists want to know if, beyond that, there is something inherently rewarding about being treated decently. They decided to look inside the brains of these people to find out. They scanned several parts of their brains involved in aversion and reward while the subjects were in the act of weighing both fair and miserly offers, and they found that, yes, both parts of the brain light up during the ultimatum game. As reported in the April issue of the journal Psychological Science, the brain finds self-serving behavior emotionally unpleasant, but a different bundle of neurons also 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 is overruling the more deliberate, rational mind. Faced with a conflict, the brain’s default position is to demand a fair deal.

So unfairness is fundamentally jarring to the brain, and fairness is fundamentally rewarding. Yet people do accept offers every day in real life that are less than equitable, and indeed they did so in this experiment. When the scientists scanned the brains of those who were “swallowing their pride” for the sake of cash, the brain showed a distinctive pattern of neuronal firing. It appears
that the unconscious mind can temporarily damp down the brain’s contempt center, in effect allowing the rational, utilitarian brain to rule, at least momentarily. So it seems contempt does not go away when the economic pie is sliced unfairly, it just goes underground.



For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

Arranging For Serenity

I am a New Age skeptic. I used to be a New Age cynic, so this shows just how far I have come in opening my mind to things I don’t understand. I no longer dismiss channeling and crystals and acupuncture as so much hocus-pocus, nor do I embrace these practices. I disinterestedly await proof.

I have to admit, though, that there is one New Age practice that has always had some intuitive appeal to me, and that’s feng shui. Feng shui is the ancient Chinese art of placement, and it’s based on the belief that space and distance and arrangement of objects can affect our emotions and our sense of well-being. This makes sense to me on a gut level: I know that I feel a greater sense of psychological equilibrium in some spaces than I do in others. I just don’t know why.

Psychologists have some ideas about this connection between physical space and thought and emotion, or what they call “psychological distance.” We’ve all had the sensation of being “too close” to a situation, needing to “get away” and “put some distance” between ourselves and others. Our sense of emotional connectedness (or lack of it) is tightly entangled with our perception of geography and patterns in space.

Two Yale psychologists decided to explore the power of these perceptions in the laboratory, to see if indeed an ordered and open space affects people’s emotions differently than a tighter, more closed-in environment. Put another way, do we automatically embody and “feel” things like crowding or spaciousness, clutter or order?

Lawrence Williams and John Bargh ran a series of experiments to test this out. All of the studies began with what’s called “priming”—the use of a cue to create an unconscious attitude or sensation. In this case, they used a very simple but well-tested technique: They had respondents graph two points, just as you would on an ordinary piece of graph paper. But for some the points were very close together (for example, 2 and 4 or -3 and -1), while for others they were far away (12 and 10, or -8 and -10). This simple exercise is known to bolster people’s unconscious feeling of either congestion or wide open spaces.

Then they tested the subjects in various ways. For example, in one study they had the participants read an embarrassing excerpt from a book, then asked them if the passage was enjoyable, or entertaining, whether they’d like to read more of the same, and so forth. They wanted to see if a sense of psychological distance or freedom might mute emotional discomfort, and that’s exactly what they found. Those who had been primed for spaciousness were less discomfited by the embarrassing experience; they found it much more enjoyable than did those with a pinched perception of the world.

The psychologists ran another version of the same experiment, except that the book excerpt was extremely violent rather than embarrassing. They got the same basic results. Those who had been primed for closeness found the violent events much more aversive—just as we find an airplane crash in our own neighborhood much more upsetting than a crash 3000 miles away. Williams and Bargh believe this has to do with the brain’s deep-wired connection between distance and safety, a habit of mind that likely evolved when our hominid forebears’ survival was a much more precarious matter.

The psychologists wanted to explore more directly this link between psychological distance and real peril, and they did so in an unusual way. As described in the March issue of Psychological Science, they primed the participants’ minds in the usual way, then had them estimate the number of calories in both healthy food and junkfood. Their reasoning was that the calories in French fries and chocolate are perceived as a health threat—emotionally dangerous--whereas the calories in brown rice and yogurt are not, so that people primed for closeness would be more sensitive to the threat. And that’s what they found: Those who had been made to feel crowded and closed in thought there were more calories in junkfood than did those feeling open and free. Their perceptions of healthy food were identical.

So that’s pretty convincing. But Williams and Bargh decided to run one more test, one when dealt head-on with the issue of personal security. They asked all the subjects about the strength of their emotional bonds to their parents, siblings and hometown, and found that those with greater psychological distance had weaker ties even to these important emotional anchors. Or put another way, they had more emotional detachment from the world.

What’s remarkable is that this all takes place unconsciously, out of awareness: The spatial distance between two arbitrary objects (in this case, two mere dots on a graph) is apparently powerful enough to activate an abstract symbol of distance and safety in the brain, which in turn is powerful enough to shape our responses to the world. It’s almost enough to make me move that vase a bit farther from the sofa, and just a bit closer to that lamp over there.

For more insights into the quirks of human nature, visit “We’re Only Human . . .” at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.