Editor’s Note:
What would you do if a stranger sent you a Christmas card? A psychologist actually randomly sent Christmas cards to people they didn’t know to study the recipients’ psychology. The results showed that most people who received the cards also sent Christmas cards back to the psychologist. This interaction pattern allows individuals to establish cooperative relationships, move away from zero-sum games, and benefit each other.
When wise sages are tasked with choosing words or principles that surpass all values, the final contenders are often “love” or “reciprocity.” In fact, “love” and “reciprocity” speak of the same thing – they are forces that connect us to others.
Psychologist Robert Cialdini, in his book “Influence,” cites the above research and others to demonstrate that humans have an instinctual response towards reciprocal acts of kindness. Just like other animals, when certain behavioral patterns present themselves in the environment, we exhibit the same behavior.
For instance, young seagulls automatically peck at a red dot visible on their mother’s beak, triggering her to regurgitate food to feed them. Similarly, when a seagull sees a red dot at the end of a pencil, it also zealously pecks at it.
Cats worldwide, when tracking mice, adopt a technique of crouching, moving stealthily, and pouncing. However, if a cat sees a string dangling with a wool ball at the end, it will use the same mouse-hunting skill to pounce on the wool ball because the string triggers the cat’s “mouse tail detection module.”
Cialdini believes that human reciprocal behavior is a similar behavioral response: if someone you know does you a favor, you feel compelled to reciprocate. Even if a stranger bestows us with a favor of no practical value, we feel the urge to reciprocate. The example of receiving a Christmas card from a stranger and sending one back is a case in point.
Drawing parallels between animals and humans aren’t entirely accurate. Seagulls and cats react to visual stimuli triggering immediate specific behavioral responses, whereas humans interpret situations and assign meaning before generating corresponding behavioral motives, responding after a few days. Thus, the reciprocity “strategy” is an applied behavior in the human brain.
Tit for tat is a tit-for-tat policy where one responds in kind to the treatment received. This strategy emerges during the initial interaction between two parties. After treating each other kindly, responses are based on how the other party treated you in the first encounter. The tit-for-tat model enables humans to move away from the limitation of “sacrifice self for the family” and opens up opportunities for cooperative assistance with strangers.
Interactions among animals (beyond the family unit) are essentially zero-sum games: when one animal benefits, it means another loses. However, if animals can find ways to cooperate rather than exploit and harm each other, mutual benefit can be achieved.
Animals that rely on hunting for survival often face extremely unstable food sources: at times, they catch more than they can consume in a day, but sometimes they go weeks without finding anything to eat. Therefore, those who learn to exchange food from abundant times with other animals to secure food sources for times of scarcity can better weather survival crises.
For example, when a vampire bat has a bountiful night, it regurgitates blood from its stomach to feed the bats that didn’t feed well that night, even if they are not from the same family. This behavior seems to defy Darwin’s views on species competition unless the vampire bat remembers which bats have helped it before.
In reality, vampire bats do engage in reciprocal behavior, akin to what’s depicted in the movie “The Godfather.” Other highly social animals also exhibit such traits, especially in groups with high stability, where members are familiar with each other, making this behavior evident.
However, if cooperative behavior cannot be sustained, the tit-for-tat behavior pattern can only be integrated into groups on a hundred-unit scale. Once group members become too numerous, “bad-behaving” bats can freeload, receiving food each night from different bats, but when a former benefactor comes to ask for food, the freeloader pretends to sleep, feigning ignorance.
How do those deceived bats react? In human terms, we know what they would do: they would teach the ungrateful freeloader a lesson.
Retaliation and gratitude are the moral emotions underlying the tit-for-tat behavior.
Animals evolve behaviors of reciprocating kindness and retaliating against harm to establish cooperative relationships, move away from zero-sum games, and benefit from each other.
Species that understand reciprocating kindness and retaliating against harm can form larger, more coordinated groups because members who exhibit generosity will make friends and reap more benefits, while those who exploit others will face consequences due to increased enemies.
The innate human tendency of tit for tat leads us to reciprocate kindness, insult with insult, eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth. Some even propose that the human brain contains an “exchange organ” that keeps track of public interactions, such as debts of gratitude or owed favors.
The term “exchange organ” is metaphorical, and no one truly believes there is a specific organ in the brain responsible for managing interpersonal reciprocity.
However, recent evidence suggests that there might indeed be an “exchange organ” in the brain, as the brain’s various functional systems usually operate through separate neural networks to perform specific functions. From this perspective, the concept of an “exchange organ” holds some validity.
Imagine being invited to play a game called “Ultimatum,” devised by economists to study the conflict between “fairness” and “greed.”
In this game, you and another stranger are in a lab where the researchers give one of you twenty-one dollars – let’s say, not you, but the other person. Then, this person decides how to split the twenty-one dollars with you. They give you an ultimatum: take it or leave it.
The crux of the game is that if you refuse the money or reject the offer, both of you will end up with nothing. Economists predict that if you act rationally, the other person will give you a dollar because they know you would prefer one dollar to nothing, and you will accept their conditions as their judgment of you is accurate. However, economists’ predictions about both of you are wrong.
In real life, very few people would only give the other person one dollar – about half would give ten dollars. But what if the other person offers you seven dollars? Five dollars? Three dollars? Most people would accept seven dollars but not three dollars. People are willing to pay a certain amount, but they won’t go over seven dollars, choosing to end the game with neither party receiving anything, punishing what they perceive as insatiable greed in their partner.
Alan Sanfey and his colleagues at Princeton had participants play the “Ultimatum” game inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. They closely observed which areas of the brain reacted significantly when participants experienced unfair treatment compared to fair treatment.
The researchers found three brain regions showing notable responses (in response to unfair and fair treatment comparisons), with the most pronounced being the frontal insula, a cortical area on the underside of the brain’s frontal lobes. It’s known that when we experience the most negative or unpleasant emotions, such as anger or disgust, the frontal insula shows a notable response.
Another significantly responsive area is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, located just below the sides of the forehead, known to activate during reasoning and calculation tasks.
In Sanfey’s study, what stood out was the final responses – observing changes in the brain before participants made decisions accurately predicted their willingness to accept the other person’s offer.
Generally, participants who showed more prominent frontal insula responses than dorsolateral prefrontal cortex responses rejected unfair treatment. Conversely, those showing more dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity than frontal insula response were willing to accept unfair conditions (perhaps why marketers, political advisors, and intelligence officers show interest in neuroscience and “neuromarketing”).
It’s due to the human psyche of reciprocity and retribution that highly cohesive social communities can form. In essence, reciprocity and retribution are two sides of the same coin, each essential. Those who reciprocate but don’t retaliate are at risk of being exploited, while those who retaliate but don’t show gratitude soon find themselves shunned.
(Website Op-ed)