Finding the brain’s generosity centre

Scientists from Oxford University and UCL have identified part of our brain that helps us learn to be good to others. The discovery could help understanding of conditions like psychopathy where people's behaviour is extremely antisocial. The researchers were led by Dr Patricia Lockwood, who explained: 'Prosocial behaviours are social behaviours that benefit other people. They are a fundamental aspect of human interactions, essential for social bonding and cohesion, but very little is currently known about how and why people do things to help others. People who rated themselves as having higher levels of empathy learnt to benefit others faster than those who reported having lower levels of empathy. Dr Patricia Lockwood, Department of Experimental Psychology - 'Although people have a remarkable inclination to engage in prosocial behaviours there are substantial differences between individuals. Empathy, the capacity to vicariously experience and understand another person's feelings has been put forward as a critical motivator of prosocial behaviours, but we wanted to test why and how they might be linked.' The scientists used a well-understood model of how people learn to maximise good outcomes for themselves and applied this model to understand how people learn to help others.