Claire
Stephen
The prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science published a paper by University of Oregon researchers who found that paying taxes was associated with pleasure in the brain. Though the article was published in 2007, their findings are interesting, and appears to have relevance to political issues today (especially the part about egoists).
A cognitive psychologist and two economists placed subjects in an magnetic resonance Imaging (MRI) machine after giving them $100. While participants watched their money go to the food bank through mandatory taxation, researchers scanned their brain activity using functional imaging. After paying taxes, participants could choose to voluntarily donate more (charity) or keep the remainder for themselves. Voluntary giving brought the most pleasure, but mandatory giving also significantly increased activation in the pleasure circuit.
The surprising thing to scientists is that mandatory giving brings reward. And even though charity is more pleasurable, the researchers warn against a higher reliance on charitable giving. One of the authors points out that in a voluntary environment, lots of people free-ride and donations fall. The authors report to Science Daily :
“Paying taxes can make citizens happy. People are, to varying degrees, altruists. On top of that they like that warm glow they get from charitable giving. Until now we couldn’t trace that in the brain. Neural activation from mandatory taxation helps predict who will give. We could call the people whose brains light up more when money goes to charity than to themselves altruists. The others are egoists. Based on what we saw in the experiments, we can use this classification to predict how much people are willing to give when the choice is theirs.”
The same pleasure circuit is activated in response to food and sex. So want to feel some pleasure while making the world a better place? Pay your taxes and donate a little extra voluntarily. Now what to do about all those egoists…
The Fault Line 
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