Stable, rich, free, but not saving enough. It is not only the United States. Latin America's wealthiest and most well-run country, Chile, doesn't save enough either.
The oldest debate since humans have been having debates is whether our species is good or evil. This debate has been dominated by philosophers and theologians, and our legal, economic and social policies depend critically on the answer. Now neuroscience has provided new evidence on our human nature.
How do people return to society after perpetrating violence? This question plagues many places on the planet, from Cambodia to Rwanda where thousands of former child soldiers have rejoined their villages, to the United States which currently has over one million people jailed for violent offenses.
Can New Yorkers love each other? If you had some of BMW's resources, could you design a night that would catalyze New Yorkers to connect with strangers?
Syria's Bashar al-Assad is a dictator. But even dictators must have the implicit consent of the populace to govern. Armies are only so big, after all. The consent of the governed manifests as trust. Trust that the dictator, while surely rapacious, is also interested in bettering (or at least mostly not hurting) the ruled.
Just after the sun rose on July 7, 2008, Hans Reiser led police and prosecutors to Nina's shallow grave. Reiser was about to be convicted of strangling his estranged wife to death when he agreed to plead guilty to second-degree murder and reveal where he dumped Nina's body. In exchange, he would dodge the death penalty.
TED-head and Other Things That Happen at TED Global
I'm dead. Last full day, 6pm slot. Everyone's tired from a week of TED talks, dinners, parties, networking, challenging others and being challenged, publicly engaging in, using Matt Ridley's memorable phrase, "ideas having sex". Welcome to TED Global.
I spotted Max when I walked on the plane. Hair cut into a V in the front of his head, fumanchu beard, genie pants, and ponytail. I was on the way from LA to Spain for the first conference on neuromagic. I knew Max Maven was attending, though I had never met him. And, I knew he was considered one of the "deans" of magic and magic history.
Watch my speech on Reason TV. Are markets imposed on us or are they a natural outgrowth of our human nature? I explain how neuroscience can resolve this question.
Humans are complicated. Most animals are excellent strategists, they figure out how to get the most food or the best mate very rapidly and act to reach these goals. Humans sometimes make decisions poorly because we "over-think" choices, worrying about future consequences and who might know about them.
Why Social Media Is Driving Political Change in the Arab World
Mohamed Bouazizi had worked full-time since he was ten years old. Because he worked in the state-controlled and corrupt economy of Tunisia, Mohamed held various jobs to support his mother and six siblings. For his last job, Mohamed built a small cart to sell fruit to commuters along a roadside.
Love in the workplace? Forbidden! In these days of mandated sexual harassment training, we are constantly warned to keep our even mildly lascivious thoughts and emails, not to mention our hands, to ourselves. But, human nature may trump the law. I make it a practice to hug everyone who works for me and most of those who work around me, both males and females.
My previous posting on The Moral Molecule about the neuroscience of running a con has generated a lot of interest so I thought I'd extend this with a second article. This week I spoke to Iris Yudai at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation about a conwoman who took her for $20. You can hear our discussion of why people con others and how one can be made more attuned to potential cons.
The Power of a Handshake: How Touch Sustains Personal and Business Relationships
Written with Susan Kuchinskas
A solid handshake is more important for landing a job than your resume, according to research from the University of Iowa. This is something anyone in sales knows implicitly. But they might be surprised to learn that the power of a handshake is rooted not in competition, but in empathy -- and even love.
Legend has it that the practice of clasping the right hands developed to ensure that neither man could wield a weapon at close range. But it may, instead, have its root in the age old need to connect with other people. It's a first step toward affiliation: the building of a bond with another person.
Neuroscientists have shown that when we are trusted by a stranger, this engages the same brain systems as other kinds of social bonds, from friendship to the love of a parent for a child to the love of your spouse. These bonds are maintained through oxytocin (ox-ee-TOE-sin), a simple brain chemical ancient in origin. Recent research from Zak's neuroeconomics lab has shown that the human brain uses oxytocin to unconsciously assess if a person is trustworthy using our memory of past encounters and all of our senses, including touch. If the stranger is a good match for other trustworthy people, the brain releases oxytocin, telling us it is safe to trust.
At the same time, oxytocin causes the release of another brain chemical, dopamine, in the brain's reward center. This little charge helps us associate a trustworthy person with pleasure. The next time we meet this person, the trust assessment happens more quickly. This is how oxytocin encourages what's called "pro-social behavior." That's all the positive behaviors and feelings we share with others: love, trustworthiness, generosity, and compassion.
Oxytocin is like social glue, reminding us to stick close to friends. It's also an economic lubricant, allowing us to extract economic value from social interactions. Research from Zak's lab revealed that oxytocin reinforces social values. Inhaling oxytocin makes people more trusting and more generous. It also increases empathy-- the ability not to just see another person's side of things, but to feel the way he or she must feel. But how do we get the feel of another?
George Stewart, the associate professor of management and organizations in the Tippie College of Business who performed the handshake study, says that a warm handshake sets the tone for the rest of the job interview.
Research from Zak's lab published this month in Evolution and Human Behavior shows why: Touch primes the brain to release oxytocin. In Zak's experiment, half the participants received a 15-minute massage and then played an economic game in which they exchanged real money. After being trusted by a stranger with money in the hope that they'd reciprocate, the brains of participants who got a massage released much more oxytocin than those who simply rested alone. Amazingly, those who received massages returned 243 percent more money to the stranger who showed them trust than those who rested.
The oxytocin system, which can be fired up by touch, allowed us, in ancient times, to enter into economic exchange with others. Even in today's global economy, touch is vitally important to doing business. Our feelings about someone else, and the pleasure we feel in cooperating, is the foundation for trade with others. And it all starts with a handshake.
Susan Kuchinskas is the author of The Chemistry of Connection, available in 2009 from New Harbinger. Her blog, Hug the Monkey, is recognized as one of the most authoritative sources of oxytocin information on the Internet. Paul J. Zak is the Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California and Professor of Economics and Neurology. His lab discovered the role of oxytocin in facilitating trust between strangers. His new book Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy is available from Princeton University Press.
56-year-old Keith Walendowski of Wisconsin isn't, unfortunately, the first midwestern American man to greet a loved one's perceived betrayal with the business-end of a sawn-off shotgun. Nor will he be the last. What is unusual about the July incident is that Walendowski's "victim" -- found among the household garbage when the police came to arrest him -- was, in fact, a lawnmower, whose "betrayal" was refusing to start once too often.
So what? Another quaint anecdote about small-town middle-America eccentricity: nothing of relevance here for us "normal" folk. We would never dream of shooting our lawnmower. Or, say, slapping a recalcitrant Xerox machine. Or getting out of a stalled car and kicking it. Or shouting "You useless piece of junk!", in various shades of rage, at whatever sprite-haunted household appliance was currently ruining our day, our week, our life.
So our question is: Why is the world full of supposedly inanimate objects that are out to get us?
Take that uniquely malicious gremlin that resides in your laptop (and now you can stop even pretending that you don't know what we're talking about). It's never driven you, for instance, to be standing on your balcony with $1,000 worth of state-of-art IT equipment clutched above your head, and the intensely vivid image in your mind of the cursed thing hitting the concrete four stories below and shattering into a thousand pieces -- gremlin and all. No? Just us?
Conjuring the image of smashing your computer was therapeutic. The same flashbulb-therapy that apparently most parents (and some press-ganged babysitter friends) experience when they briefly imagine throwing interminably-mewling babies down stairs. But why household appliances?
There's a two-fold answer. First, we have the relatively conventional idea that, "Mind-reading has created a spirit-haunted world." In our evolutionary past, it was adaptive to "take the intentional stance" -- to "mind-read", or impute motives -- to various elements in our environment. The ability to imagine that, say, a glimpsed saber-tooth was planning to eat you; or a seemingly broken-winged bird was faking so as to divert you from her brood; or a pair of jackals were plotting to raid your kill, would have enhanced our ancestors' survival chances.
The ability to imagine that, say, the capricious River Spirit required thanks in the form of a libation of fish, or that the wrathful Volcano Spirit demanded an animal (or human) sacrifice, would not. As "selfish gene machines", we really shouldn't be squandering our valuable resources on placating non-existent nature spirits. Or indeed shooting our own lawnmowers.
But here's the thing. Human cognitive-behavioral systems are the belated end-products of a billion-year process characterized by the repeated, thrifty and opportunistic re-jigging of old designs for new and approximate purposes. The modern human-mind-as-palimpsest is the eventual result of on-the-fly evolutionary processes continually "over-writing" new functions onto old. The resultant systems (like mind-reading) prove flexible and robust, but also somewhat fuzzy.
Take another such cognitive-behavioral system: THOMAS ('The Human Oxytocin-Mediated Attachment System'). An ancient mammal hormone that promotes social bonding, oxytocin recently hit the news again due to a radical research revelation about its role in human maternal care. Simply put: the higher a mother's oxytocin levels at birth, the stronger the resultant mother-child bond.
THOMAS traces its mammalian evolutionary roots from rodents, where it promotes pair-bonding, up through primates, where the hormone supports various sophisticated social behaviors, such as friendship coalitions. By the time it emerges full-blown in humans, THOMAS promotes bonding to lovers, relatives and friends; colleagues, neighbors and pets; and, more "fuzzily", to gardens, cars, and household appliances.
THOMAS is powerfully motivating: a "hungry" system as well as a "fuzzy" one. This combination makes it likely to occasionally target "inappropriate" objects. Our ancestors might, for example, have "fuzzily" come to regard a favorite fruit tree or watering-pool as a "friend". Unconvinced? Try persuading your young daughter to give up her comfort blanket before she's ready. Or ask daddy (again) why he won't throw out his filthy ancient one-eyed teddy bear.
THOMAS is more likely to do inappropriate "hungry-fuzzy targeting" when natural objects of affection are scarce. A 56-year-old single man still living at home with his mother is a prime candidate for a THOMAS mis-attachment. Because, of course, Walendowski didn't hate his lawnmower. He loved it. Until it betrayed him once to often, and he expressed his newfound love-hatred with both barrels.
Meanwhile, we're off to copyright our idea for a reality TV show in which furious contestants beg for revenge upon their gremlin-possessed appliances, while viewers vote for which one gets hurled from a four-story balcony, or "wasted" with a sawn-off.
The California Supreme Court's decision to allow same-sex marriage was greeted with both joy, and indifference. Joy from the gay community, where some couples had waited over quarter of a century to officially affirm their bonds. And indifference from much of the rest of California, including the anti-gay-marriage lobby.
But, is there any science that can help shed light on gay marriage? We are wary that past scientific 'contributions' have added at least as much heat as light to the debate. Now, lets provide new insights into the brain mechanisms that support same-sex relationships.
Much of the anti-gay-marriage argument rests on two commonly held assumptions: Life-long exclusive mate-bonding for purposes of rearing joint offspring is natural, and homosexuality is unnatural.
Both assumptions have little basis in fact.
Homosexual acts have, in fact, now been widely documented across a range of mammal species (that's right -- we're 'outing' mammals!), including our closest relatives, apes and monkeys.
Research published this week in the journal Public Library of Science ONE showed that one reason that male homosexuality has survived (even though gay men produce fewer offspring than straight men) that the 'gay gene' must be somehow beneficial to women, or it would have been eliminated from the gene pool.
Meanwhile, there seems to be nothing particularly 'natural' about marriage. Only about 3% of mammal species are monogamous -- meaning they cohabitate -- and few of these species mate for life. And nearly each partner in these 'animal marriages' engage in extra-pair mating. Lifelong sexual loyalty in nature is, it turns out, a vanishingly rare commodity.
It turns out that both marriage and homosexuality are, in fact, both common for our species. As research at Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in California has shown, human attachment behaviors depend on the same 'bonding' molecule called oxytocin, also found in other mammals. When the human brain releases oxytocin, we immediately begin to care about those around us: family, friends, and even complete strangers. This effect is so unfocused, that we also care about nonhumans, too, including dogs, cats or stranded whales. We name our cars, and cry when we sell our houses.
Oxytocin is also the basis for virtuous behaviors towards strangers. Researchers in my lab have shown that in humans, oxytocin promotes trustworthiness, generosity, and empathy. These virtues make the free societies we live in possible -- without oxytocin we would need Big Brother monitoring every human interaction to eliminate crime, cruelty, and selfishness.
Because the oxytocin attachment system is a blunt instrument, it is not surprising that we see long-term same-sex partners. Our highly evolved, inherently flexible, human attachment system allows us to have a morality -- a love beyond the self -- that far exceeds anything found in our mammal relatives. So, long-term attachment between genders and within a gender should be viewed as natural as the care and affection we quite easily show to those around us.
Paul J. Zak is Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA. His new book is Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, published by Princeton University Press. Ken Grimes is a writer based in London, UK.
