People are particularly sensitive to injustice because in our brain there are specific brain networks involved both in perception and in response to social injustices.
This is revealed by a new experimental research conducted by Mirre Stallen of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands and colleagues from other Dutch and US institutions, published in the journal "Journal of Neuroscience" , which also revealed some interesting and partly unexpected data .
For our brains, in fact, punishing a criminal can be more rewarding than rescuing a victim. Moreover, our tendency to inflict punishment is greater when we suffer the wrong in the first person and is influenced by the levels of a specific hormone, oxytocin.
The study involved some volunteers in a simulation, a game in pairs in which one player could damage the other by subtracting tokens. A third subject could observe the game and intervene punishing the first player or compensating the second for the damage suffered. Meanwhile, the researchers conducted a series of brain imaging scans on the volunteers to highlight areas that were activated gradually while doing their job.
The first result was that each participant was more likely to punish the wrongdoer when he suffered injustice personally than when he was a mere observer. The decision to punish was associated with activity in the ventral portion of the striatum, a brain region involved in the processing of reward signals. The neuroimaging scans also detected the activation of other areas: the anterior portion of the insula, associated with the decisions to punish the damage suffered, and the amygdala, related to the degree of severity of the punishment.
In inflicting punishment, an important role is played by oxytocin. The data was already known in general terms, but the tests have better circumscribed the action of this hormone. When the experimenters administered it to some subjects before the start of the tests, these tended to punish the malefactors more frequently, albeit with milder sentences.
Overall, the authors write, these results provide a more in-depth view of the fundamental brain mechanisms underlying punishment and compensation of wrongs, and also illustrate the importance of adopting a multidisciplinary approach when studying the complex components of decision-making processes that affect everyday life.
