Natalie Angier reports on new research on women's brains that indicate that there is a pleasure center reward associated with cooperative behavior. In other words, we get a glow on by treating each other well. At least, most of us do. It seems that there may be a certain percentage who just aren't wired up the same way.

Assuming that the urge to cooperate is to some extent innate among humans and reinforced by the brain's feel-good circuitry, the question of why it arose remains unclear. Anthropologists have speculated that it took teamwork for humanity's ancestors to hunt large game or gather difficult plant foods or rear difficult children. So the capacity to cooperate conferred a survival advantage on our forebears.

Yet as with any other trait, the willingness to abide by the golden rule and to be a good citizen and not cheat and steal from one's neighbors is not uniformly distributed.

I'd like to hear the results of a similar study of men. How about we start with those chumps at Enron or WorldCom?

4:29:37 PM    please comment []