Possibly seen as supplemental to (Neuro-Cooperation):
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=3d35e5d2.340387416%40news.erols.comhttp://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992663
Brain's 'cheat detector' is revealed
22:00 12 August 02
Emma Young
Part of the human brain is dedicated to detecting cheats, say
evolutionary psychologists, after a study with a brain-damaged man.
"We think it develops in all normal individuals, and that it develops
in part because our brains were selected to develop this competence,"
says John Tooby at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Tooby and his colleagues studied a man who suffered accidental damage
to the limbic system, a brain region involved in processing emotional
and social information. RM, as he is referred to, performed as well
as other people on one set of reasoning problems, did much worse on
problems specifically designed to test reasoning about social
exchanges.
At its simplest, social exchange runs along the lines of "you scratch
my back and I'll scratch yours". Previous work has shown that people,
and some animals, are extremely good at keeping a check of who owes
who within a group - and at spotting and punishing cheaters.
Researchers had proposed that general reasoning abilities could
account for this. But RM's deficit suggests that detecting social
cheaters depends on specialised neural circuitry, the team says.
Their conclusion is "robust," says Nigel Nicholson, an evolutionary
psychologist and director of the Centre for Organisational Research
the London Business School. "It's essential we have trusting
relationships with people in communities where we are highly
interdependent for survival and reproduction. Cheat detection is
very important," he adds.
Separable component
The first problems given to RM and the 37 non-brain-damaged controls
concerned so-called precaution rules. For example: "If you work with
toxic chemicals, you have to wear a safety mask." The second tested
social contracts, for example: "If you go canoeing on the lake, you
have to have a clean bunk house."
RM recorded a score of 70 per cent on the precaution rule tests - the
same as the controls. But he scored only 39 per cent on the social
contract tests, compared with 70 per cent for the non-brain damaged
people.
Identical tests on two other people with brain damage similar to BM's,
but with a slightly different pattern of damage, showed that their
social contract reasoning was unimpaired.
"RM's differential impairment indicates that being able to detect
potential cheaters may be a separable component of the human mind,"
the researchers conclude in the journal Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences.
Utterly unfamiliar
However, if a region of the brain has evolved to specialise in cheat
detection, it should be present in all people, the team reasoned.
Most experiments are performed on people living in modern, western
societies.
So they studied people living in traditional, non-developed
communities in the Amazonian region of Ecuador. And they found that
these people were equally proficient at social exchange tasks, even
when the problems concerned social rules that were unfamiliar to them.
"What is quite amazing about their performance on cheater detection
is that it flies in the face of all ordinary ideas about learning a
higher level cognitive skill," Tooby told New Scientist. "People are
just as good at utterly unfamiliar rules as they are with rules that
are personally and culturally highly familiar."
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(DOI: 10.1073/pnas.122352699 and DOI:10.1073/pnas122352999)
Out-of-Body Explanation: http://IanGoddard.net/paranorm.htm
