Does Generosity Come Naturally to Those With Kind Hearts?

Does giving the gift of dark, gourmet chocolate come easy for you?

From New Scientist is this fascinating article about the possible origins of generosity! Here is an excerpt from this intriguing article:

"...generosity – or the desire for fairness – seems automatic and arises from activation in a brain area that controls intuition and emotion.

Neuropsychologists define "prosocial" people as those who prefer to share and share alike, and "individualists" as those who are primarily concerned with maximising their own gain.

Inequality aversion

According to one theory, the difference between these two groups is that prosocial people actively suppress their selfish tendencies with the help of their prefrontal cortex. But Masahiko Haruno of Tamagawa University in Tokyo, Japan wondered if some people might instead have an automatic aversion to inequality.




Haruno, along with Christopher Frith of University College London used functional MRI to scan the brains of 25 prosocial people and 14 individualists (presorted using a standard behavioral test) while they rated their preference for a series of money distributions between themselves and a hypothetical other person. As expected, the prosocial group preferred even splits while the individualists favoured distributions where they got the most money."

Follow this link to read more in depth details about this interesting theory.