POLITICSharm on her. On average, responders tend to punish proposers who offer
30 percent or less of the money they were told to share.
That number, 30 percent, is not fixed in stone. Different people,
under different conditions, will make different decisions. Researchers at
Cambridge and Harvard Universities found that participants who were
given citalopram were twice as likely to accept low offers. Combining
those results with the results of additional tests of moral judgment and
behavior, the researchers concluded that the citalopram recipients were
reluctant to harm the proposer by rejecting her offer. They found the
opposite effect when they gave participants a drug that lowered sero-
tonin levels: they were more willing to inflict harm to serve the greater
good of enforcing standards of fairness.
The researchers concluded that the serotonin-boosting drug
increased what they called harm aversion. Increasing serotonin shifts
moral judgment away from an abstract goal (enforcing fairness) toward
an avoidance of carrying out actions that might harm someone (depriv-
ing the proposer of her share of the money). Thinking back to the
trolley problem, the logical approach is to kill one person to save five,
whereas the harm-aversion approach is to refuse to take someone’s life
for the benefit of other people. Using drugs to influence these decisions
has the unsettling name of neurochemical modulation of moral judgment.
The single dose of citalopram made people more willing to for-
give unfair behavior and less willing to view harming another person
as permissible, an attitude consistent with an H&N predominance. The
researchers described this behavior as prosocial at the individual level. Pro-
social is a term that means willingness to help other people. Rejecting
unfair offers is called prosocial at the group level. Punishing people who
make unfair offers promotes fairness that benefits the larger commu-
nity, which is more consistent with a dopaminergic approach.
SHOULD THEY STAY OR SHOULD THEY GO?We see this individual/group contrast play out in the debate over
immigration. Conservatives tend to focus on smaller groups, such as