There’s a French proverb:

He who wants to harm his dog, accuses it of having rabies.

or

Qui veut noyer son chien l’accuse de la rage.

Famously, this appeared in Moliere’s play, Les Femmes Savants, when Martine grumbles, “Give a dog a bad name and hang him.”

Less famously, she subsequently quips:

Service is no inheritance.

Jonathan Swift would lyricize this “true saying” about three decades later. Its origin, however, seems to be in 16th century India, making its way west via Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone and its derivitaves, the most well-known being Gagliuso by Perrault.

Better understood in English as “one doesn’t get fat in other folk’s service”, the odd proverb pairs wisely with the one preceeding it in Moliere’s text…

absolving our greed⌗

The perpetrator of a wrong action gets away with it by assigning the blame to the victim. From a normative perspective we should construct opinions about others based on what they have or have not done; yet we do so based on the shape of their face, the structure of their speech, or the way they walk. Moliere’s conjecture implies that we construct unfounded opinions about others to justify our aggression.

We alter our beliefs about others to act selfishly and, at the same time, keep a positive self-view - all the while robbing them of their dues.

aka self-deception⌗

the coexistence of cooperation and selfish instincts

Two important findings emerge from recent cognitive behavior research:

  1. a higher ambiguity about others’ social preferences leads to a higher likelihood of acting selfishly
  2. people acting selfishly will increase their belief that others are also selfish

These mechanisms undermine a global cooperative society.

what then?⌗

How do we combat / change / act in spite of this?

Communication. Open, honest, kind communication.

And a fair amount of self-relection.

maintaining trust⌗

…when agents can engage in self-deception.

Thresholds exist above which a system approaches a state of complete distrust.

The Corruption Game⌗

  • derived from the Dictator Game
  • begins with a player (the agent)
    • decides how to allocate twenty tokens between self and recipient
    • tokens were the payment for a boring job that was done by the agent and another player (the allocator)
    • agent and allocator never meet
  • some agents can choose, completely freely, how many tokens to keep
  • other agents have a small margin of action:
    • choose to keep ten, eleven, or twelve tokens
      • i.e. forced to distribute at least eight to the other player
    • controls how much the agent can mistreat the other player, so as to see later what the agent thinks about the recipient
  • recipient receives tokens in sealed envelopes
    • does not know how they were distributed
    • trades own tokens (and the agent’s) for cash
      • trade fairly?
        • $5 for each token
      • trade corruptly?
        • according to arrangement offered to the cashier
        • $2.50 for each token
        • will offer a bribe
        • i.e. benefits the cashier and recipient, cheats the agent

Will selfish agents justify their action by arguing that their recipients were going to be corrupt?

Since the tokens are in a sealed envelope, the player who acts corruptly does so only on the basis of personal predisposition, not for revenge or payback.

The study shows that those agents who were offered more freedom to play aggressively tend to deem the recipients as more corrupt.

When we can choose to be more hostile and aggressive, we tend to think that others are corrupt.

Further refinement with a new experiment in which the recipient must act in one of three ways:

  1. trade each token for its face value
  2. choose to act corruptly or not
  3. trade the tokens for half of their value and keep the commission (i.e. forced to act corruptly)

Study shows that the agent distributes token with equal generosity when knowing that the recipient has no freedom of choice (#1 or #3), and much less generously when unsure as to what the recipient would do (#2).

In the game of beliefs and trust, it is ambiguity that’s the real killer.

We are hostile with those we believe could betray us. It is the fear of being made a fool of, of trusting someone who will not reward us in the same way.

Our own selfish actions turn into harmful beliefs about others (“everyone is corrupt”), and ambiguity about others' beliefs (“they may be corrupt”) makes us selfish and aggressive.

The vicious cycle, only remedied by firmly sowing certainty and trust.

In order to do so, we must enter the deepest recesses of words and the deepest structures of the brain.

persistence of social trust⌗

When players make a confident, cooperative and altruistic decision in the trust game, the regions of their brain that codify dopaminergic circuits of pleasure and reward are activated.

Our brains react similarly when exposed to something pleasurable - sex, chocolate, money - as when displaying solidarity.

Being good has value.⌗

In repeatedly playing the Corruption Game, players learn and align in a pattern. As one player distributes generously, the other becomes progressively more generous, and vice-versa.

In general, the game comes to two solutions:

  1. perfectly cooperative: all players win more
  2. selfish: the first player wins less and the second gets nothing

The brain discovers the other player’s inclinations using the same learning mechanism that explains the neuroscience of optimism.

the neuronal circuit of social reputation⌗

A person, before playing, already has an expectation of their fellow player. When there’s a discrepancy, the brain’s caudate nucleus activates and releases dopamine. This produces a signal of prediction error that in turn makes the person determine to calculate more precisely whether the other player will cooperate in the future. As this calculation becomes more exact, the behavior of the other person is learned, and the signal lessens.

the trust network is robust and sturdy⌗

As one grows confident in their ability to predict another’s behavior, the brain “ignores” occassions in which there is a discrepancy between their moral expectation of a person and that person’s actions.

Those who establish that someone will act morally do not change that belief merely because they find an exception.

Over time, as a population with established moral expectations grows to sufficient size, a culture of trust (or distrust) emerges. Such a culture, in turn, has implications on its population’s diversity.