Though they might grumble about it on tax day, a team of interdisciplinary University researchers found that people derive some of the same satisfaction while paying taxes that they experience when giving a charitable donation or receiving a gift.
Even more surprising, University economics professor Bill Harbaugh said, is that some humans – “altruists” who give only to help others – give almost twice as much as those motivated by ego. That concept was what originally attracted Harbaugh, psychology professor Ulrich Mayr and economics doctoral candidate Daniel Burghart .
Conventional wisdom caricatures economists as researchers who see people motivated only by greed, Harbaugh said, but the field has readily accepted that people are not motivated by self-interest alone. Americans give away about 3 percent of their annual income, he said, so the study is remarkable because it finds evidence of such benevolent action rooted in the human brain.
“People genuinely respond in their brains when they saw money going to a charity,” Mayr said.
Nineteen volunteers were asked to make decisions about donating money and also required to make certain mandatory payments to a local food bank from an account. Using Magnetic Resonance Imaging , researchers observed that areas of the volunteers’ brains usually activated by concrete rewards like money and food also lit-up with activity when they donated or even were required to donate.
Mayr said this primitive area of the brain, present in animals as simple as rats, is “evolutionarily ancient.”
“The same area that tracks how well you are doing also tracks how well others are doing,” he said.
Harbaugh and Mayr said they see the study as a potential guide for the government to asses potential tax rates.
“The results show that’s obviously not zero,” Harbaugh said.
Burghart said he was drawn to the idea of using brain scan to investigate how people handle economic decisions, a “hot field” of study, Mayr said. The techniques for brain scan studies have progressed rapidly during the past 15 years and will probably prove to be decisive in the future.
“The type of data you get from an FMRI machine is just really rich,” Burghart said. “I think it’s cool, although that might sound geeky.”
The study, “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations” published in the June 7 edition of Science magazine, has garnered an avalanche of attention from bloggers on the Internet and the mainstream media. Some of the criticism has been misdirected, Mayr said.
“The message that’s gotten out is ‘You feel better by paying taxes,’” Mayr said. “The real world isn’t as simple as that.”
Harbaugh noted that only after reading some of the “right-wing blogs” did he realized how many people say they hate paying taxes. Nevertheless, he pointed out that most people pay taxes willingly out of a sense of duty or civic obligation because the odds of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service are too low to act as a deterrent.
“It sort of took on a life of its own,” Harbaugh said. “I knew this was a cool study, but the reaction has been (larger than expected). I think our 15 minutes are almost up.”
Contact the news editor at [email protected]