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Electric shock study suggests we'd rather hurt ...

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/201...

BNP DESIGN STUDIO/ALAMY

When it comes to profiting from painin this case, via electric shockspeople are more likely to harm themselves than
others.

Electric shock study suggests we'd rather hurt


ourselves than others
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By John Bohannon (/author/john-bohannon)
17 November 2014 3:00 pm
/electric-shock-study-suggests-wed-rather-hurt-ourselves-others#disqus_thread)

Comments (/brain-behavior/2014/11

If you had the choice between hurting yourself or someone else in exchange for money, how altruistic do
you think youd be? In one infamous experiment, people were quite willing to deliver painful shocks to
anonymous victims when asked by a scientist (http://news.sciencemag.org/scientific-community/2014/10
/seven-creepiest-science-experiments) . But a new study that forced people into the dilemma of choosing
between pain and profit finds that participants cared more about other peoples well-being than their own. It
is hailed as the first hard evidence of altruism for the young field of behavioral economics.
Human behavior toward others is hard to predict. On the one hand, we stand out in the animal world for our
altruism, often making significant sacrifices to help out a stranger in need. And all but the most antisocial
people experience psychological distress at witnessing, let alone causing, pain in others. Yet study after
study in the field of behavioral economics has demonstrated that we tend to value our own needs and
desires above those of others. For example, researchers have found that just thinking about money makes
people behave more selfishly (http://news.sciencemag.org/2006/11/money-and-me-me-me) .
To try to reconcile the angels and devils of our nature, a team led by Molly Crockett, a psychologist at the
University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, combined the classic psychological and economics tools for
probing altruism: pain and money. Everyone has their own pain threshold, so the first task was a pain

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Electric shock study suggests we'd rather hurt ...

http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/201...

calibration. Researchers administered electric shocks with electrodes attached to the wrists of 160 subjects,
starting at an almost imperceptible level and amping up until the subject described the pain as intolerable.
(For most people, that threshold for pain is similar to holding your wrist under a stream of 50C water.)
Then the team drew pairs of subjects randomly and sat them down in front of a computer. Each person
knew of the existence of the other but did not see him or her. One of the pair was randomly chosen to be the
decider in a series of trials. The decision involved how many electrical shocks would be doled out, either to
the decider or to the anonymous receiver. Both people knew that the shocks would be at a level that had
been established during calibration as mildly painful but not intolerable.
Those zaps came with price tags. The total amount of money that could be gained in a trial varied from
about $0.15 to $15, but there were always two deals to choose from. The decider might have to choose, for
example, between doling out seven shocks for $10 versus doling out 10 shocks for $7. Or sometimes the
shocks were cheaper in bulk: You could dole out seven shocks for $10 versus 10 shocks for $15. No matter
who got the shocksthe computer told the decider who would get the shocksthe decider always got the
money.
A computer algorithm adjusted the price ratios over the course of the trials to home in on the costs
associated with peoples preferences. Those monetary values served as a proxy measure of how much
people cared about harm to themselves versus harm to others. If the pessimistic view of human nature is
true, people should be more averse to shocking themselvesand so be willing to make less moneyas
compared with shocking others.
But the opposite happened. The studys participants did not like the pain of receiving a shock, because they
were willing to make about $0.30 less money per shock on average to receive fewer of them. But people
were willing to lose twice that amount, $0.60 per shock, to hurt an anonymous other less
(http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1408988111) , the team reports online today in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences.
The next step, Crockett says, is to do the experiments while scanning people's brains to "investigate how
these [moral] computations go awry in disorders like psychopathy."
This is a landmark study, says Johannes Haushofer, a psychologist at Princeton University. The result is
both obvious and surprising. Intuition dictates that people should be willing to give up some money to avoid
the distress of hurting someone. But despite decades of research, the effect had not previously been
demonstrated, he says. It may be possible to tap into this altruism simply by reminding people in positions
of powerfrom chefs to politiciansof the painful consequences of their decision to cut corners.
Posted in Brain & Behavior (/category/brain-behavior) , Social Sciences (/category/social-sciences)
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