Surprise is not exactly what people like the most. We tend to assign better character to those we see more responsible for good outcome of interaction.
Is the most important for us what we can not see? The recent study proves it might be. Particularly in digesting information from outside environment and during social interactions. And, what’s more, the key in the way we interact with others may depend on two small structures of our brain – hippocampus located in the upper-head at the corner. How is this possible? Hippocampus is the course of our memories and emotions and thus latent causes of the process of identifying features of the environment. The outcome of the interaction very often depends on the pattern which has been already set. Moreover, the contribution to the outcome may not be equal and the perception of that is also determined by hippocampus activity. Scientists from Oxford examined blood flow in this part of the brain using imaging of functional magnetic resonance. Disruption of the prefrontal cortex activity impaired participants’ ability to update their estimate of the portion of the contribution during interaction and thus the responsibility for the outcome – state scientists with the leading role of Ali Mahmoodi. Hippocampal activity reflects interference of cause.
What is the nature we like?
Every day we interact with others. We observe other people, we observe the environment around us and we decide whether to deepen interactions of withdraw from them. We are learning from the experiences we obtain. But to learn we need to identify causes responsible for those experiences. And this is very important for our social life – identification of an event and even more – determinant which contributed to it. This underlines the outcome of the interaction. We are gathering feelings and results and they are stored in our hippocampus. Cortex updates estimated association between cause and outcome.
But some causes of an event have to be discovered, yet. And the link between an observer of an event and the update does not need to be sequential. Instead it might occur simultaneously due to neural activity taking place at the same time in more than one part of the brain. What also is important in our social interactions we tend to assess more positively outcomes generated by people we consider as a good character. We see them more responsible for a positive outcome while people we see more negatively we consider to be more responsible for poor outcome. Of course we are able to update our estimates but usually we do it in a way the good character is gaining more while the bad character is losing more. Why?
Mysterious cells
Scientists confirmed the results in the study of activity of brain cells and choices made by participants. Because we prefer less surprising outcome we are connecting what is good with good and what is bad with bad. This is due we are able to store our experiences in our hippocampus. We are capable to learn though. When we observe or experience a bad outcome from certain interaction we will expect the next one is going to be the same. This is why we estimate the responsibility for worse outcome is larger for character previously linked to poor result. And opposite. We prefer to assign more positively outcome to people before responsible for the one. The update of our assessment is also more beneficial for character associated with positive outcome and more strict in the case of character considered responsible for poor outcome. And these are the hidden causes in a process of interaction. We are conscious of some of them as we remember our previous experiences and we may be not able to identify them despite they are stored in our brain cells.
The study has been published in one of the top science and medical journal ,,Neuron”.
Leave a Reply