Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spiderman, The Avengers… the list of superheroes featured in popular culture and entertainment media of every society is long. We love them because the crusaders, often caped, fight for justice, save the day, and bash up criminals. Some start off by fighting back following harm to themselves, moving on to fight for the society as a whole. All of us would like to be them. Neuroscientists now say that this is because of the hormone oxytocin that maintains a feeling of fairness or justice in us.
Research published in ‘The Journal of Neuroscience’ says that punishing a wrongdoer may be more rewarding to the brain than supporting a victim. In a study, titled, ‘Neurobiological Mechanisms of Responding to Injustice’, researcher Mirre Stallen and colleagues started with the premise that people are particularly sensitive to injustice. They wanted to explore the processes that underlie the perception of injustice, and the subsequent decisions to either punish transgressors or compensate victims.
In the study, participants played a game in which two players, a ‘Taker’ and a Partner’, each started out with 200 chips. The Taker could steal up to 100 of the Partner’s chips, and then the Partner could retaliate by spending up to 100 chips to reduce the Taker’s stash by up to 300 chips. Participants played as either a Partner or an Observer, who could either punish the Taker or help the Partner by spending chips to increase the Partner’s stash.
The researchers observed that neural mechanisms underlying punishment differed depending on whether one was directly affected by the injustice, or whether one was a third-party observer of a violation occurring to another. The reward-related brain regions were preferentially involved in punishment compared to compensation. So, punishing a wrongdoer was way more rewarding to the brain than supporting a victim.
Before beginning the experiment, all participants were given a nasal spray, with some randomly assigned to receive the hormone oxytocin, which has been suggested to have a role in punishing. Participants in the oxytocin group chose to give more frequent, but less intense, punishments. This finding implicates oxytocin in corrective punishments akin to a ‘slap on the wrist’ to maintain fairness.
Says the study, “The perception of injustice is a fundamental precursor to many disagreements, from small struggles at the dinner table to wasteful conflict between cultures and countries. Despite its clear importance, relatively little is known about how the brain processes these violations.” “The results,” concludes the study, “provide valuable insights into the fundamental neurobiological mechanisms underlying social injustice.”
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