MBB Distinguished Lecture 1, Professor Ernst Fehr, The Neurobiology of Human Altruism VIDEO

September 30, 2014

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

5pm

Northwest Building, B-103

The Neurobiology of Human Altruism
Human altruism shaped our evolutionary history and pervades social and political life. There are, however, enormous individual differences in altruism. Some people are almost completely selfish, while others display strong altruism, and the factors behind this heterogeneity are only poorly understood. We examine the neuroanatomical basis of these differences with voxel-based morphometry and show that gray matter (GM) volume in the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is strongly associated with both individuals’ altruism and the individual-specific conditions under which this brain region is recruited during altruistic decision making. Thus, individual differences in GM volume in TPJ not only translate into individual differences in the general propensity to behave altruistically, but they also create a link between brain structure and brain function by indicating the conditions under which individuals are likely to recruit this region when they face a conflict between altruistic and selfish acts. In a final step we show that human altruism indeed depends causally on the functional integrity of TPJ. If we down-regulate TPJ with tanscranial magnetic stimulation individuals become less altruistic in the sense that they donate less money to charities that help other humans. This reduction in altruism occurs despite the fact that individuals evaluate the charities as equally deserving as a control group that receives placebo stimulation. Thus, a distorted TPJ still enables proper judgment of deservingness but nevertheless reduces the willingness to act altruistically.  Post-talk commentary by Professor Joshua Greene (Harvard).

 

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