|
Using brain-scanning technology, researchers have found an unlikely force at play in the minds of people paying taxes: Pleasure. In their experiment, taxing people for a charitable cause activated the brain's reward centers - the same areas that respond to such sources of delight as food and sex.
"Paying taxes can make people feel good," said William Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon and co-author of the study. Previous research had established that voluntary giving stirs activity in the brain regions that process feelings of reward. The new study, published Friday in the journal Science, is the first to show that involuntary payments can evoke the same reaction.
The research is part of a blossoming field of study called neuroeconomics, which combines economics, neuroscience and psychology to better understand human decision-making, cooperation and competition.
In the study, researchers gave $100 to each of 19 female volunteers. The volunteers confronted choices about giving money to a local food bank or having money for the food bank taken from them involuntarily, like a tax. Researchers scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technology that can map surges in brain cell activity in specific parts of the brain.
The experiment helps explain the curious willingness of people to pay taxes, which has long puzzled economists. Given the low risks of getting audited, economic theories predict much greater rates of tax evasion than actually occur.
The findings also could help resolve a long-standing debate about the motives behind altruistic behavior. One side asserts that the satisfaction gained from contributing to the overall public good drives people to give money, a motive known as "pure altruism."
The competing view, known as "warm glow" altruism, holds that people give mostly for the ego-stroking feeling that their personal act of charity made someone else feel better.
"Warm glow is a little more egotistical," Harbaugh said.
The experiment showed that both forces play a role in altruistic behavior. Subjects had no choice in the tax-like transfers of money to the charity, but they still experienced reward-related brain activity. That showed pure altruism at work, rather than warm glow altruism, since the subjects had no choice in the matter.
But researchers also found that voluntary donations to the food bank triggered significantly more activity in the brain's reward centers than occurred when people paid the same amount as a tax.
"When people give voluntarily, you get some additional brain activity, which is attributable to warm glow," said co-author Ulrich Mayr, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Oregon.
Based on how strongly the subjects' brains responded to receiving money or giving it to the food bank, the researchers found that they could predict how likely individuals were to donate. Those with higher brain activation when money went to the charity rather than to themselves were about twice as likely to give money voluntarily.
Besides bringing new information to scientific debates, the researchers said the findings may help point the way to improving taxation systems.
"We've shown that in principle you can devise tax situations where people feel good about giving," Mayr said. In real life, however, he pointed out, perceptions of contributing to the public good through taxes may be too far removed. People subjected to taxes may consider their obligation unfair or object to their government's choices for spending the tax money.
The results also highlighted the human weakness that makes taxes necessary and total reliance on charity unlikely. When people in the experiment were given the choice to donate to the food bank, the charity received 10 percent less money than when people were taxed. That's because some people became free riders, giving little or nothing.
Jordan Grafman, chief of cognitive neuroscience for the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said the study's findings are important, particularly for opening a path for economic studies to take into account the emotional factors that help shape economic decision-making.
But Grafman expressed some doubt about the study's single-minded focus on the brain's reward areas.
"These are not the key structures involved in, for example, our willingness to donate to organizations we have no kinship or direct group affiliation with," Grafman said. He said studies by his group highlight critical roles played by two higher brain regions involved in goal attainment and bonding with others.
By Joe Rojas-Burke
Newhouse News Service
|
Full Newsletter
