How (12 page)

LOOKING OUT FOR NUMBER TWO

If trust isn’t something that results from high, rational functioning, what is it?

Trust, it turns out, is a drug called oxytocin. The so-called bonding hormone is a peptide chain of nine amino acids (nanopeptide) secreted by the pituitary gland and most famously released during the orgasms of both sexes and by mothers during birth and nursing. When released, oxytocin fills the synapses between neurons and floods the brain with a feeling of well-being. This brief bliss (the effects of a cerebral oxytocin buzz last just three to five minutes) reduces the connectivity of the amygdala to the upper brain stem; in other words, it overcomes fear. Kirsch and Esslinger demonstrated this effect. They showed two groups of people identical pictures of fearsome faces and fearsome situations and, like similar studies, mapped their brains’ reactions with fMRI scans. One group received oxytocin via nasal spray (you can synthesize it in a lab); the other group did not. The unmedicated group was predictably afraid of the scary faces; the oxytocin group was not.

Oxytocin, when produced, does not flood the whole brain. It works on specific regions associated with memory, as well as those that control involuntary functions like breathing, digestion, and heart rate. Amazingly, these brain regions connect powerfully to a different portion of the brain associated with attention and identifying errors in the environment, which in turn sends messages to the decision-making region. In other words, oxytocin influences decision making in a way that is largely outside the realm of our conscious perception.

What can we draw from all this? So much of our thinking about the highly competitive world of global business is predicated on the assumption that maximum profit and success flow from the pursuit of self-interest. Business is war, goes the old saying; the strong survive and the weak fail. We commonly assume that, left alone on a deserted island like Tom Hanks in
Cast Away
, man would revert to this basic instinct to look out for number one, that we are biologically hardwired to do so, and that we only cooperate with others
because the conditions of society demand it
. But this assumption may be incorrect. It would seem that humans, at a very early stage of mental development, are hardwired with the ability and desire to connect with and help others, despite the fact that doing so engenders great risk and returns no obvious reward. Moreover, in order to do so, we have an amazing biological gift that allows us to overcome our animal, prerational fear of the unknown.

In light of some of this new thinking about the biological basis of trust and altruistic helping, Paul Zak, chair, department of economics at Claremont Graduate University and adjunct professor of neurology at Loma Linda University, School of Medicine, set out to learn, once and for all, whether maximum profit in fact flows from the pursuit of self-interest, as we have long assumed. Zak is the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies and a leading light in the emerging field of neuroeconomics, the place where economics and the mind meet. Neuroeconomics draws on neuroscience, endocrinology, psychology, economic theory, and experimental economics to try to better understand economic decision making. Zak staged an experiment based on a game theory form called
the trust game
first used by Joyce Berg, John Dikhaut, and Kevin McCabe in 1995,
⁸
and made some fascinating discoveries that stand conventional thinking about self-interest on its proverbial head.

The basic trust game goes like this: Random subjects are paired up and placed at computers in different rooms, unable to see each other. Each is paid $10 to participate. The first decision makers (DM1s) are told they can send any portion of their $10 to their partner (DM2) and the amount they send will be tripled in DM2’s account; if DM1 sends $4, then DM2 receives $12. The DM2s are told they can then send any, all, or none of the money they receive back to their partner. The money DM1 sends is, in effect, an expression of trust; the amount DM2 returns is an expression of trustworthiness.

The economic thinking prevailing at the time about how each person should play the trust game to achieve optimum profit comes from the work of John Nash, the noted mathematician portrayed by Russell Crowe in the Academy Award-winning movie
A Beautiful Mind
(based on the biography by Sylvia Nasar).
⁹
His famous formula—called the Nash equilibrium—represents mathematically the correct action to achieve maximum profit in a world of perfect self-interest.
¹⁰
For Zak’s game, Nash’s reasoning concludes that, if each person acts in perfect self-interest, neither should send the other any money at all; DM1 should send no money because he has no reason to believe that his anonymous partner will return any and to do so would require sacrifice without guaranteed return, and DM2 should not return any because he gains nothing by doing so.

Zak ran this experiment a vast number of times, both in the United States and in developing countries, using various amounts representing, in some cases, a large percentage of the subject’s monthly income (to make sure that the significance of the amount involved did not influence the outcome). Amazingly, typically 75 percent of DM1s sent some money to their unknown partners, and an even
higher
ratio of DM2s sent some back.
¹¹
I spoke to Zak and asked him about this counterintuitive result. “The trust game is embedded in social interaction,” he told me, “and the Nash equilibrium does not take that into account.” Nash, Zak points out, suffered from schizophrenia, a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by, among other things, social withdrawal. To some extent, Zak believes, Nash’s illness affected his economic theories. “Cost isn’t the only reason people buy product A versus product B,” Zak said. “There are any number of social, human-based reasons involved, and Nash never calculated those into his equations.”
¹²

Zak theorizes that we trust others because doing so activates social attachment mechanisms; in other words, it seems the right thing to do. Trust appears to be driven by a
sense
of what to do, rather than a conscious determination of what is most profitable to do. To understand this hypothesis better, Zak performed blood tests on his subjects after they had played the trust game and made a phenomenal discovery: The more money DM2s received from DM1s, the more their oxytocin levels rose, and the more they returned to DM1s. Put another way, when you trust someone, their brain responds by making more oxytocin, which allows them to trust you in return.
Reciprocity
—
doing unto others as they do unto you
—
seems therefore to be a biological function; trust begets trust
. (Interestingly, Zak pointed out, roughly 2 percent within the groups did not share any of the wealth, a number roughly corresponding to the percentage of sociopaths in a population.
¹³
)

Furthermore, remember, oxytocin directly affects the areas of the brain associated with memory. When you extend trust, which is at times an unconscious behavior, you not only bathe this area of the brain with soothing chemicals, you create memories of having done so. This concurrence of activity led Zak to conclude that it is possible to restimulate and reinforce trusting behaviors over time. In other words, trust
builds
trust, as well, on a biological basis.

How does that translate into the modern marketplace? If trust is, as Zak explains, “a tangible, intentional act in which you cede power over resources to another person,” both sides can recognize extending trust as cooperation for potential gain. We generate feel-good hormones in the people we trust, and they reciprocate by trusting us in return. We, in turn, consciously or unconsciously acknowledge their trust with a similar biological response. Fear dissolves, cooperation ensues, and an upward spiral of mutual reinforcement thrives. We are on some level, it seems, hardwired to seek connections with others, to build biological networks to achieve greater personal gain.

THE EVOLUTION OF WHAT IS VALUABLE

Survival of the fittest is an evolutionary concept we take for granted. Yet, when it comes to humankind, what defines the fittest? Is it the strongest? When early man was walking around in animal skins and living in caves, did the biggest ones rule the littlest ones? Did they get more food or a reproductive advantage because of their size? Though this is, I think, a common assumption, the cutting edge of social anthropological thinking suggests that it may be false. If modern man is so much more than brute force and the ability to use tools, then at some point in our evolution mustn’t we have selected for other traits? What if humankind’s greatest strength is not the size of our muscles but our seemingly irrational embrace of connection and cooperation—our ability to form societies of like-minded individuals? We have already seen that we have a biological predisposition to do this and, it turns out, we have an evolutionary one as well. Like so many things that make us who we are, our predilection to form human networks and work together is a result of both nature and nurture.

Let’s think about what binds groups of people together. One of the primary ways societies and organizations fill the interpersonal synapses between their members is with common beliefs or values. These could be as simple as “If we hunt together, we will get more food,” as primal as “We take care of each other no matter what,” or as psychologically complex as “Our spiritual beliefs prescribe that we act in a certain way toward one another.” Like trust, values are to some extent also hardwired into our brains; they are the outgrowth of the neurological effect of trust on our attention-focusing, memory, and error-recognition faculties. However, they are more flexible and more learnable, a more conscious process than automatically released oxytocin and its neurological by-products. We learn values like a vocabulary, from the people around us, and their behaviors set an example of the behavior norms of the group.

Children absorb their society’s values in the same way they learn the language of their society—a child in France learns French, a Saudi child learns Arabic, and so on. Culture exerts a powerful influence on values formation. A behavior obligatory in one culture could be prohibited in another culture, while a third culture might not care one way or the other. The content of values is largely culturally determined and culturally sensitive. Each society reinforces its own hierarchy of values: what is important and what is less so. The traffic accident study we discussed in Chapter 2 demonstrated that both U.S. and Korean cultures prize the values of respect for law and obligations to friendship, but each society assigns them a different priority in its hierarchy of values. Likewise, a child raised in one society may have certain moral boundaries that do not translate into another society.

Below the surface of the societal norms, however, there are certain values that translate across sociopolitical boundaries. Historically, societal values have had evolutionary impacts on how human societies have flourished. Anthropologist Joseph Shepher, for example, studied people raised communally on kibbutzim in Israel, where children spend much of the day in a group. He discovered that people have a strong tendency
not
to be sexually attracted to those with whom they were raised, irrespective of genetic relationship.
¹⁴
Something in the group experience over time interrupts the biological urge toward procreation. Shepher’s work reinforced the nineteenth-century hypothesis by Edward Westermarck that this tendency is a mechanism for incest avoidance. Back in the earliest human societies, someone you knew from childhood was probably your cousin, and thus not a prime candidate for reproduction. Therefore, the cultural aversion to incest stems from our physical hardwiring.

So it seems that culture and values are not
solely
learned; evolution also ingrained them in our biology. Dr. Richard Joyce from the Australian National University, author of
The Evolution of Morality
, calls this “fitness-survival.”
¹⁵
Joyce is a remarkable thinker, as anyone who speaks with him would quickly realize. His work combines the study of evolutionary anthropology with the study of moral philosophy to provide another model that has far-reaching implications for how we function in organizations and networks. “
Moral thinking
[the capacity to conceive of social behavior in terms of values] can be found in every culture and throughout history, tracing back even to the
Epic of Gilgamesh
or ancient Egyptian writings,” he said.
¹⁶
Joyce believes this ubiquity of moral thinking raises an important question: “Is there a biological predisposition toward values-based thinking,” he asks, “or are we just smart, rational creatures who are social and sort of naturally invent morality as a way of getting on as social beings?”

In other words, if we want to play to our strengths, to which strengths should we play?

Joyce’s conclusion? Moral thinking goes back to our earliest ancestors and through a process of natural selection has become part of the fabric of our biological beings. Joyce explains that there are two schools of thought about the evolutionary benefits of values-based behavior: the
benefit-to-the-group
model and the
benefit-to-the-individual
model. In a group model, our fictional caveman ancestor—call him
Ook
—and his tribe-mates somehow developed a cooperative, altruistic, value-based society that allowed them to function more efficiently than their neighbors; they could farm or hunt or defend themselves better, or shelter themselves in such a way that they were able to grow their tribe. Their neighboring tribe, two hills and three caves over, had no sense of values, and thus would be more disorganized and less capable of cooperation, trust, and sharing. Eventually, starvation, exposure, or other factors eliminated the other tribe because they were unable to produce a smoothly functioning society. This “survival-of-the-fittest-group” scenario has obvious ramifications for developed societies—like corporations—but it leaves something out: How did we get to be a group of moral thinkers if we weren’t born that way?