Interestingly, the research team also had their subjects fill out a questionnaire to determine their degree of Machiavellian behavior. Those who proved to be the most ruthless of the bunch offered little to nothing when there was no threat of punishment, but within the punishment paradigm, they were generous enough to stave off retribution.
"These are socially intelligent, selfish people," Fehr says about the more calculating subjects. "They escape the punishments that are inherent in social interactions, because they seem to have a fine sense of when punishment is in the air."
Crime and Punishment: Why Do We Conform to Society?
A pair of brain regions work together to assess the threat of punishment and override our selfish tendencies
Whether you subscribe to the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule or some instinctive moral code, society functions largely because most of its denizens adhere to a set of norms that allow them to live together in relative tranquility.
But, why is it that we put a vast amount of social resources into keeping stealing, murdering and other unfair (not to mention violent and illegal) acts to a minimum? Seems it all comes down to the fact that most of us don't cotton to being punished by our peers.
"The reason why punishment for norm violations is important is that it disciplines the potential norm violators," says Ernst Fehr, an economist at the University of Zurich and the senior author of a paper on the issue published this week in Neuron.
In the new study, Fehr and colleagues uncovered activity in two areas of the brain underlying the neural mechanism involved in conforming to society's values. They further determined that subjects with Machiavellian personalities—a strong sense of self-interest, opportunism and manipulation—have heightened activity in one of these regions, which the authors believe is related to assessing the threat of punishment.
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