How money affects the "moral molecule" in your brain: An interview with Neuroeconomist Paul J. Zak

Paul J. Zak is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University. He coined the term "neuroeconomics," defining it as the merging of neuroscience and economics. Simply put, he says, neuroeconomics is "really about why people make bad decisions regarding money."

His research seeks to answer questions like, "Why would you ever help someone when you don't have to?" or "Why would you ever be generous or trustworthy?" These kinds of questions, he says, "underpin modern economies."

Zak has conducted between 20-30 studies on oxytocin, a naturally occurring substance found in the brain that has been called "the love molecule" and "the empathy molecule." Zak calls it the "moral molecule."

"When you receive money denoting trust," he says in the video, "your brain releases a chemical called oxytocin. Oxytocin motivates you to reciprocate. It makes us feel empathy for others. It connects us to others."

As an example of a "bad" decision regarding money, Zak offers the following thought experiment: a child has fallen into a well and is discovered crying for help. The story makes it to the national news and the entire nation watches the event as it unfolds on television. The cost to rescue the child is two million dollars. Should we cap the well with the living child still inside, and instead spend the two million dollars vaccinating children in poor communities across the country, which would save "hundreds and hundreds" of lives? Maybe we should, but of course we won't. It would be unthinkable to let the child die. "When we hear those cries of that child, you feel yourself there. We have empathy for that." One particular life has more of an effect on our brains than 200 statistical lives.

Zak says this quirk of human behavior is the basis of trade. "Trade is one person asking for something and another person giving it to them. Trade depends on morality, that 'care for the others,' the same kind of brain mechanism."

The entire interview is filled with fascinating insights, but my favorite part was learning that Zak's experiments reveal that 98 percent of people are trustworthy -- that is, when you trust them, they reciprocate in kind.

And to those two percent that can't be trusted? Go to an oxytocin party already, willya?

Mark Frauenfelder – Editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and the founder of the popular Boing Boing weblog, Mark was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and is the founding editor of Wired Online.

Comments

[Laura Lee]

Interesting interview. The problem I see the argument about markets being inherently moral goes back to Zak's example about the child in the well. We care about the individual child, but not about the statistical children. Likewise, in a market situation, we behave in social, reciprocal ways in, say the local fruit market, because it is an individual social relationship. However many of our modern exchanges are so removed from this type of relationship that they fall into the same category as the statistical children. They are too anonymous to produce feelings of empathy. My credit card issuer does not know me as a person, but as a credit score- an almost literal statistical child. Nor do I know any individuals behind my cell phone service provider. I just pay a bill. I do not perceive it as a human transaction at all. This distancing must have an impact on the level of empathy and reciprocal behavior we put into those exchanges. A huge corporation is too anonymous and large to have empathy for the consumer and the consumer too unable to envision the corporation as made up of people to have real empathy for it. In both cases they can only intellectualize that empathy as you would for the statistical children in the well story.