The Domesticated Brain (22 page)

There is something very personal about ownership. Interestingly, the change of ownership of any object to
one’s own object
registers in the brain as enhanced activity.
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In particular, there is a spike of brain activity known as a P300
,
which occurs 300 milliseconds after we register something of importance – it’s a wake-up-call signal in the brain. When something becomes mine, I pay more attention to it in comparison to an identical object that is not mine. This is why children and adults remember more shopping items placed in their own basket compared to the experimenter’s basket,
even though they were not instructed that there was going to be a memory test.
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Their P300 signals reveal that their brains register the significance of the object as belonging to them, and so focus on it, which leads to better memory.

Why should we care more about, and remember, objects that belong to us? One possibility suggested by the extended self is that the concept of who we are is partly constructed by the physical objects that we accumulate, which remain as permanent reminders of our identity, so it is important to remember what is ours. From the domesticated brain perspective, it is critically important to remember what is ours so as not to conflict with others’ ownership.

This shift of interest to things that we own and our extended self explains one of the more unusual discoveries in human consumer behaviour. In a classic study
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by economist Richard Thaler, students were handed out coffee mugs and then given the opportunity to sell them to other students. As every real-estate agent would expect, each student’s asking price was on average much higher than buyers were willing to pay. This bias, known as
the endowment effect
(TEE), is a tendency to overvalue things that come into our possession. Even just the prospect of owning an object, such as when we bid for an item in an auction, is enough to trigger our tendency to spend more than we would imagine. If we are temporarily the highest bidder in the course of an auction, we psychologically take possession of the object and are more willing to bid higher.
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If we touch an object that is for sale, then that physical contact means that we are more willing to buy it
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– something that every good salesperson knows, when they tell you to try an item of clothing on or take a car for a spin.

One
commonly accepted explanation for TEE is that it reflects loss aversion – the prospect of a loss outweighs our attitudes to the prospect of a gain.
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There are infinitely more things that we can gain in the world, but there are a finite number of things that we can lose. Brain-imaging studies of adults trading for items showed that when they were buying objects at a bargain price, the reward centres of their brains lit up.
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However, if they were made a derisory offer for an object they possessed, adults experienced negative emotions to the extent that their pain centres were activated. They felt bad about having to sell it at a lower than expected price, which is TEE. In rare cases, TEE can become so extreme that individuals cannot bear to throw anything away and become compulsive hoarders.

TEE has been found in children as young as five years of age,
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but it is not clear that it appears earlier or is a universal phenomenon. Some societies show weaker effects
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and TEE has been reported not to exist in one of the last nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, who carry relatively little in the way of personal possessions when they are on the move.
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We have also looked for TEE in much younger children in our own lab with little success. This is surprising, because we know that they have a basic grasp of ownership and will fight over toys. One possibility is that TEE is shaped by the emerging sense of self in relation to others which probably begins when children begin socializing with other children. As young children start to accumulate possessions as markers of self-identity, they begin to overvalue stuff that comes into their possession. However, this simple ownership bias must be reconciled with the need to fit in with others. They have to learn to share and
be reasonable about possessions, because one cannot live a purely selfish life without running the risk of being rejected by the group.

Sharing

Young children are notoriously selfish when it comes to sharing. Although they spontaneously empathize with others’ emotions, preschoolers will not willingly share their own food at lunchtime unless they have been specifically asked.
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They do understand that they cannot keep objects that belong to others, but left to their own devices, young children tend not to share with other children.
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As many parents know, they have to be told to share.

Children’s willingness to share was tested in a game wherein they could decide which of two rewards in the form of sweets they and an anonymous other child received.
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There were three games that pitted a strategic option against an egalitarian option of equal sharing as shown in the table below.

In game one, they could choose between the strategic option, where either they received one sweet and the other person received nothing, or they both received one sweet. In game two, the strategic option was that the child received one sweet and the other received two sweets, or the egalitarian option where they both received one sweet. In game three, the child could choose the strategic option to keep both sweets and the other received nothing or again the egalitarian option where both got one sweet.

An
adult in game one should select the egalitarian option unless they are inherently nasty to other people, since they realize it should not make any difference to them. In game two, it still does not make any difference which option you choose, but you can maximize the other person’s wealth by selecting the first option. In game three you can either share or take everything for yourself. When presented with these options, three-to four-year-old children tended to act most selfishly, always maximizing their own sweet collection. Less than one in ten was willing to share or optimize the other’s gain. In contrast, almost half of the seven-to eight-year-olds behaved more equitably, making sure that there were no imbalances on any of the games, with one exception. If they were told that the other anonymous child was from their own school, they were more likely to give them the larger reward on game two. They were more sensitive to establishing potential allegiances.

Potential allegiances are important when you need support or have to work together through cooperation. When forced to cooperate, younger children also seem to get the point of sharing. Pairs of three-year-old children were faced with a problem where both individuals had to jointly pull on two ropes to dislodge a barrier that released desirable marbles.
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The clever trick was that the mechanism was rigged to give one individual a greater reward than the other, despite their joint effort. When this happened, the child who received the greater reward shared their winnings with the other child. If they had not worked together and the apparatus simply delivered an unexpected reward to one child, they did not share. In this cooperative situation, much younger children
were willing to share, just like the older children. In contrast, chimpanzees hardly ever share. Faced with the same barrier problem but working for food instead of marbles, chimpanzees kept the reward for themselves irrespective of whether they had help or not from another chimpanzee.

It would appear that as soon as young children have to work together, they share the fruits of their labour. Yet only when they are older than five years will they spontaneously begin to share treats from a sudden windfall. With more domestication, children become increasingly sensitive to the inequalities that life sometimes brings and act more altruistically.
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There are a number of reasons why children might become more generous. They may simply become less selfish and more prosocial because it is in our human nature to become kinder with age, when we come to understand and appreciate the inequalities of life. That would be the noble interpretation. It may be that, with experience, children learn that the social norm is to share because in all likelihood this will be reciprocated in future encounters.

An alternative, darker explanation is a bit more Machiavellian. One reason that people share or are generous is to enhance their reputation in the eyes of others by appearing to be kind. Support for this ulterior motive comes from observations that adults are less financially generous when there is no audience to witness their donations
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or the amount they donate remains anonymous.
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It would seem that noble acts of generosity are intended to help ourselves more than help others. This is also true of children. When five-year-olds were presented with the opportunity to share
stickers, they were decidedly ungenerous unless the recipient was present and the amount they shared was transparent.
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Ulterior motives do not mean that all of us operate like this and the fact that vast amounts of money and property are donated to charities anonymously seems to undermine the ignoble account. However, these forms of altruism work at the psychological level because they make us feel better about ourselves. In order to understand such altruistic acts, we have to recognize how helping others makes us feel good, but feel bad when we don’t.

The kindness of strangers

We often help others in situations where there is no immediate benefit to ourselves or indeed there is no reward in the future. We are even willing to help strangers. Young children start to help strangers surprisingly early. At eighteen months, they will spontaneously pick up dropped items and open doors or boxes to help an experimenter even when they are not told to do so or given a reward.
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In fact, rewarding children makes them less helpful because we generally do not like having our acts of kindness reduced to something that was done for obvious gain.
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It is unlikely that children have been trained to help, but rather, they do so because it is in our human nature.
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Animals can help other members of their own species, but the observations of helping in non-human primates are sporadic and open to alternative interpretations that divide the scientific community. In fact, some argue that the basic principle of helping others out of good will is uniquely human.
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Chimpanzees
will reliably help a human retrieve an out-of-reach object, but the helping may have been shaped during their captivity. Whenever we see domesticated animals performing feats that are not observed regularly in their natural habitat, we have to ask whether those abilities are part of their repertoire or rather demonstrations of the power of learning and expectations. After all, throughout this book we have been arguing that domestication changes brains and behaviour. Semi-wild chimpanzees
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and other non-human primates
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appear to cooperate, but they do not necessarily think of helping as a selfless act. There are many reports of animals working in collaboration but ultimately these are strategies to benefit the individual.

Chimpanzees will lend a hand to help another gain access to food, but not if they have to give up food that is already in their possession. Not only do chimpanzees fail to share food with non-relatives but that selfishness also applies to mothers and their babies. When their baby is begging for food, it has been observed that mothers will pass on a morsel, but when they do, it is usually done reluctantly and she gives the less nutritious and appetizing parts of the plant to her baby.
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Of course, chimpanzee mothers possess a maternal instinct to protect their babies, but apparently that nurturing does not reliably extend to readily giving up a treat or two. Can you imagine a human mother behaving like that at the local nursery group?