A new study suggests that a small part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefontal cortex (DLPFC) is key to suppressing selfishness. Neuroscientists from the University of Zurich and Harvard Medical School used electricity to temporarily disable that portion in volunteers. Those subjects were happy to screw other people out of money in a behavioral science game called the Ultimatum Game. The researchers published their results in the current issue of the journal Science. From HealthDay:
The experiment shows that this part of the cortex “is clearly very important for our social behavior, our societal evolution,” Sanberg said. The right side of the DLPFC helps people resist those strong urges for sex, money and general acquisitiveness that come from more primitive sites outside the cortex, he said.
“It provides modulation of those urges, so that you can have control over them,” Sanberg added. “As we evolved, we somehow developed this control over our basic needs.”
One intriguing line of research is whether the right-side DLPFC functions similarly in everyone — even hardened criminals or sociopaths.
“This is a very interesting question which we are just exploring now,” Fehr said. “Preliminary results suggest that the right DLPFC has very different activation across individuals.”