The University of Oregon announced a new piece of research last week with a startling headline: “Paying taxes, according to the brain, can bring satisfaction.”However, it must be kept in mind that the study sample comprised just 19 female students from the University of Oregon. And second, they were not exactly paying taxes.The paper is by a psychologist, Ulrich Mayr, and two economists, William T Harbaugh and Daniel R Burghart, all from the University of Oregon.Some usual incentives for being charitable like the fear of looking stingy or the prestige of being named in the programme of a charity dinner, were removed. Each student was given $100 and told nobody would know how much of it she chose to keep or give away. Payoffs were recorded on a portable memory drive that the students took to a lab assistant, who paid the students in cash and mailed donations to charity without knowing who had given what.Brain responses were measured by a MRI machine as transactions occurred. Sometimes, a student had to choose whether to donate some cash to a local food bank. Sometimes, a tax was levied that sent money to the food bank without her approval. When the typical student chose to donate to the food bank, she was rewarded with a warm glow: increased activity in the ancient areas of the brain—the caudate, nucleus accumbens and insula—that respond when you eat a dessert or receive money. But these pleasure centres were also activated, but not as much, when she was forced to pay a tax to the food bank.“The basic pleasure centres didn’t respond only to what’s good for yourself,” said Mayr, the psychologist.
