一本教会你“做对”题的6级阅读书 day9 passage6
Passage 6 Generosity is Natural for Kind-Hearted People
慷慨是一种天性 《新科学家》
Getting into the spirit of giving during the holiday season
may seem like a struggle, but it turns out generous people
aren't fighting the urge to oppress others, as some have suggested.
Instead, generosity - or the desire for fairness seems automatic
and arises from activation in a brain area that controls intuition and emotion.
Neuropsychologists defined "prosocial" people
as those who prefer to share and share alike,
and "individualists" as those who are primarily concerned
with maximising their own gain.
According to one theory, the difference between these two groups
is that prosocial people actively suppress their selfish tendencies
with the help of their prefrontal cortex.
[01:00]But Masahiko Haruno of Tamagawa University in Tokyo wondered
[01:07]if some people might instead have an automatic dislike to inequality.
[01:14]Haruno, along with Christopher Frith of University College London
[01:20]used functional MRI to scan the brains of 25 prosocial people
[01:26]and 14 individualists
[01:29]while they estimated their preference for a series of money distributions
[01:35]between themselves and a hypothetical other person.
[01:39]As expected, the prosocial group preferred even splits
[01:44]while the individualists favoured distributions where they got the most money.
[01:50]A less predictable finding was that the only brain region
[01:55]that differed in activity between the two groups was the amygdala.
[02:01]When presented with unfair money distributions the activity
[02:05]in the amygdala increased significantly in prosocial people
[02:10]but not in the individualists. "And the more they disliked the split,
[02:15]the more activity you saw in this region," says Frith.
[02:20]"The amygdala tends to respond automatically, without thought,
[02:26]or even without awareness," says Frith. Combined with the fact
[02:32]that there was no difference in activity in the prefrontal cortex
[02:37]responsible for suppressing urges this suggested
[02:42]that the suppression theory might not be borne out.
[02:47]To further test if the prosocial dislike to unfairness was automatic,
[02:53]the researchers repeated the test,
[02:56]this time giving the participants a memory task to complete at the same time
[03:02]as they estimated splits.
[03:05]They found that the prosocials' brains
[03:08]still reacted to the unfair distributions,
[03:12]even when the parts of their brain responsible for deliberative processes
[03:17]were taken up by other tasks,
[03:20]suggesting they were not suppressing selfish desires.
[03:24]Carolyn Declerck, a neuroeconomist at the University of Antwerp, Belgium,
[03:31]says the results fit with her own, as yet unpublished,
[03:36]data showing that prosocials seem to be driven by
[03:41]an automatic sense of morality.
[03:44]"So far, all our behavioural and MRI experiments confirm
[03:50]that prosocials are intrinsically motivated to cooperate," she says.
[03:57]Haruno will next try to figure out
[04:01]how this difference in the activity of the amygdala arises.
[04:06]It's partly genetic, but also likely influenced by a person's environment,
[04:12]he says, particularly the social interactions during childhood.
[04:19]He says it is interesting to think there might be ways to
[04:23]promote this activity to "realise a more prosocial society."