Hardwired for Collaboration & Altruism
July 04, 2006
We are hardwired to collaborate, co-create, and serve. In their book, Naked Conversations : How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel cite this case study of the brain - one of the many studies on the interplay of collaboration and the brain:
Dr. Gregory S. Berns, an Emory University professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, uses functional MRI and other computer-based technologies to study how the human brain responds to various stimuli. In short, his team wires the brain to see how the brain is wired. A few years back, Berns studied the interaction of biology and altruism. He used a functional MRI to scan the brains of 36 women playing the behaviorist’s game “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” in which participants are rewarded according to the choices they make. Berns found these women displayed cooperative behavior even when they knew they would receive greater rewards for not cooperating. The technology revealed that the striatum, a primitive brain sector, grew active during collaboration. In fact, it secreted five times the normal level of dopamine, the chemical that activates during such stimulating activities as sex and gambling. In short, humans are wired to collaborate. Altruism turns people on even more than making money.
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