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| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012795)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012795" |
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| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| the bank. Taking money away from the donor is a form of costly punishment. It is costly in two ways: the |
| punisher loses money he could have kept, and the donor loses money that he unfairly kept in his previous |
| exchange. |
| When donors kept a significantly larger portion of the original sum, observers punished, paying |
| the costs. They also reported feeling good about taking down the cheapskates. Where was this honey hit |
| to the brain coming from? |
| To figure this out, Fehr and his colleagues put people in a brain scanner and used a technique |
| called Positron Emission Tomography or PET. This type of scanning provides a picture of how much |
| glucose is used up by different brain areas during a task. Higher glucose consumption occurs when there |
| is higher activity in a brain region. When punishers decided to punish a selfish donor, glucose |
| consumption increased in a region of the brain associated with reward: the dorsal striatum. This region is |
| also active when you eat ice cream, earn money, and solve an unexpected problem. Punishers incurred a |
| financial cost, but gained emotional elation and internal reward. It turns out that giving someone his just |
| deserts feels like eating dessert, but without the caloric gain. |
| When distinctively promiscuous punishment evolved, it transformed our capacity to cooperate |
| and to maintain conformity to social norms. It provided us with the tools to not only repair a puncture in |
| the system of norms, but to feel good about the costs personally incurred. When we punish, we have |
| served justice and served ourselves a helping of the brain's rewards. The fossil record doesn't capture |
| when we evolved the capacity to punish, as skulls and bones, stone tools, and even paintings are silent on |
| why someone received a spear through the head — perhaps punished for a wrong doing or perhaps an |
| enemy, a competitor interested in the same resources, or a suspected lover. No one will ever know. What |
| we do know is that other primates never punish cheaters who break the norms of cooperation, whereas |
| hunter-gatherers dotting the continents do. Though people living today as hunter-gatherers are not perfect |
| replicas of what life was like way back when, they indicate that before we had sophisticated technology, |
| agriculture, and permanent residences, we had the capacity to minimize the costs of the sucker's problem. |
| Whenever this capacity emerged in human evolution, it provided a critical part of the solution to the |
| problem of large-scale cooperation among unrelated strangers. With many eyes on the look out for |
| cheaters, and a capacity to take out or ostracize the free riders, cooperation emerged as a stable solution to |
| problems that are unsolvable at an individual level, including group defense and the acquisition of costly |
| resources. Punishment enabled humans to live in large, stable cooperative societies, many of whom are |
| unrelated strangers. |
| This momentous event in the history of cooperation carried with it a serious cost, bringing |
| aggression and reward into closer proximity, with the costs of attacking others overshadowed by the |
| benefits. As I discuss in greater detail in the next chapter, this economic transformation created, as an |
| Hauser |
| Chapter 1. Nature's secrets |
| 49 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012795 |
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