'Fairness' Center of the Brain Found

Neuroscientists have finally been able to identify the location of the “fairness center” of the human brain. This is the region that makes us scream “It's not fair!” whenever we meet with a situation that we deem to be arbitrarily disadvantageous to one of the parties involved. The situational analysis is conducted mostly in the striatum and prefrontal cortex, which are areas of the brain that are also involved in evaluating rewards. The investigation was conducted using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), a technique that can show areas of the brain which experience more activity in response to a certain stimulus, LiveScience reports.

“Our study shows that the brain doesn’t just reflect self-interested goals, but instead, these basic reward processing regions of the brain seem to be affected by social information. That might explain why what happens to other people seems to matter so much to us, even when it might not actually directly affect our own situation,” explains Rutgers University in New Jersey expert Elizabeth Tricomi. The professor of psychology is also the author of a new study presenting the findings, which appear in the February 25 issue of the esteemed scientific publication Nature.

Studies such as this one may be the way to go in the future, analysts say, when it comes to understanding why exactly we care about situations in which others are involved, and which do not affect us directly. Additionally, scientists could also discover why people seem to prefer a level playing field and cannot stand unfair or arbitrary advantages. Seeing how money is widely considered to be the driving force behind everything today, the new investigation was conducted with monetary experiments, on 40 male volunteers. The participants were divided into pairs, and then asked to play a money-related game.

“Overall, it looks like these regions were responding most when the outcome would be the most fair, and the least when the outcome would be the least fair,” Tricomi says. He and his team conducted the study with the help of colleagues from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in Pasadena, and from the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, in Dublin, Ireland.