Humans like sharing wealth – subconsciously!

London: Researchers from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, have become the first to gather images to prove that the human brain is a big believer in equality. In their research, the team found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does. And this activity pattern holds true even if the brain being looked at is in the rich person`s head, rather than the poor person`s. The findings have been described in the February 25 issue of the journal Nature. "This is the latest picture in our gallery of human nature," says Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech and one of the paper`s coauthors. "It`s an exciting area of research; we now have so many tools with which to study how the brain is reacting." John O`Doherty, professor of psychology at Caltech, Thomas N Mitchell Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, and the principal investigator on the Nature paper, said: "In this study, we`re starting to get an idea of where this inequality aversion comes from. It`s not just the application of a social rule or convention; there`s really something about the basic processing of rewards in the brain that reflects these considerations." ANI