DOMINATIONfeelings of guilt, which is an H&N emotion. It is capable of inspiring
honorable effort, but also deceit and even violence in pursuit of the
things it wants.
Dopamine pursues more, not morality; to dopamine, force and fraud
are nothing more than tools.
Israeli researchers designed an experiment to help them better
understand why people cheat. They set up a pair of games that would
pit one player against another. The first was a guessing game in which
players competed to see who could guess what images were going to
appear on a computer screen. In this game it was impossible to cheat.
The second game was different: the first player rolled a pair of dice,
and announced the results to the second player. The higher the roll,
the more money the first player got, and the less her opponent got. In
this game cheating was not only possible, it was easy. The second player
couldn’t see the actual dice, so the first player could report anything she
liked. The winner and the loser of the first game took turns rolling the
dice and announcing the result.
Because of the way dice are marked, if everyone was honest, the
average score should have been about seven. The losers of the first game
reported an average roll of a little over six during the second game, which
was consistent with random chance. The winners of the first game, on
the other hand, reported a second-game average of almost nine. Statis-
tical analysis revealed that it was extremely unlikely that number could
have come about by chance. There was a greater than 99 percent likeli-
hood that the first-game winners cheated on the second game.
For the next phase of the experiment, the researchers changed
things. Instead of a competition, the first game was changed to a
lottery—and the new arrangement yielded a very different outcome.
The players who won the lottery didn’t cheat at all on the second game.
In fact, they appear to have underreported their scores, resulting in
their opponents sharing the spoils of victory.
The scientists weren’t sure how to explain this result. They thought
that maybe people who won competitions, as opposed to winning by
pure luck, developed a sense of entitlement that allowed them to justify
subsequent cheating. But by thinking about the role dopamine plays