(photo by Duane Romanell)

We first mentioned the brain's do-good-feel-good circuitry in our post Unhappy Lawyers and the Cooperative Hard Wire.  Since that time, we've created an entire category for collaboration, showing that it not only makes us feel good and perpetuates the species, but that it also makes us better problem solvers than we could ever be acting on our own (remember law school study groups?)  See e.g. Collaboration Creates Better Science.

The researchers continue to pursue this line of inquiry and today New York Times Writer and Blogger John Tierney (Tierney Lab) tells us that it feels good to pay taxes -- at least those with a charitable purpose.

The research?

Each student was given $100 and told that nobody would know how much of it she chose to keep or give away, not even the researchers who enlisted her in the experiment and scanned her brain. Payoffs were recorded on a portable memory drive that the students took to a lab assistant, who then paid the students in cash and mailed donations to charity without knowing who had given what.

The brain responses were measured by a functional M.R.I. machine as a series of transactions occurred. Sometimes the student had to choose whether to donate some of her cash to a local food bank. Sometimes a tax was levied that sent her money to the food bank without her approval. Sometimes she received extra money, and sometimes the food bank received money without any of it coming from her.

Sure enough, when the typical student chose to donate to the food bank, she was rewarded with that warm glow: increased activity in the same ancient areas of the brain — the caudate, nucleus accumbens and insula — that respond when you eat a sweet dessert or receive money. But these pleasure centers were also activated, albeit not as much, when she was forced to pay a tax to the food bank.

This doesn’t mean that the student, or anyone else, would necessarily enjoy writing a check to the Internal Revenue Service that would be spent on plenty of programs less appealing than a food bank. It is more like the tax collected by a state lottery that dedicates its profits to schools.

For the complete article, Taxes a Pleasure?  Check the Brain Scan click here.

The refinement on prior research here is that charitable giving makes some of us feel better than others  (see Altruist's Paradox, Should It Hurt to Be Nice) and that at least some of those whose pleasure centers aren't stimulated by altruism, give as much as those whose are.

My guess is that those who give without the brain "rush" also say "please" and "thank you," let motorists into the jammed traffic in front of them and help little old ladies across the street.  We used to simply call them "good citizens."  Their parents raised them that way.