Kind of. The article, Neural evidence for inequality-averse social preferences, doesn’t mention the C word, but it does claim to have found evidence that people’s brains display more egalitarianism than people themselves admit to. […]
When people received money for themselves, activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the ventral striatum correlated with the size of their gain.
However, when presented with a payment to the other person, these areas seemed to be rather egalitarian. Activity rose in rich people when their poor colleagues got money. In fact, it was greater in that case than when they got money themselves, which means the “rich” people’s neural activity was more egalitarian than their subjective ratings were. Whereas in “poor” people, the vmPFC and the ventral striatum only responded to getting money, not to seeing the rich getting even richer.
The authors of the study concluded that this is evidence of a neurobiological preference against inequality.
March 3, 2010 at 6:21 am
I love the headline here.