Header

Search
Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics (ZNE)

Media Archive 2022

05-12-2022: Conflicting Motives Govern Sense of Fairness
 

The perception that resources are unfairly distributed is at the root of many social conflicts. In a paper recently published in PNAS, Christian Ruff and Jie Hu investigate the motives influencing our perception of justice in resource distribution. They found that although people feel an aversion to inequality, they are also reluctant to harm others and to upend existing social hierarchies. 

Research shows that two conflicting motives play a particularly important role in the assessment of distributive justice: inequality aversion and the reluctance to harm others. To understand how these motives interact with each other, a team around Neuroeconomists Jie Hu and Christian Ruff used functional magnetic resonance tomography (fMRT) to study the brain activity of test participants during a redistribution task. 
The participants were generally more willing to make others financially worse off if this reduced inequality – in particular if the initial inequality was substantial. However, there seemed to be a limit: a redistribution that made the initially advantaged person worse off than the other was not chosen, even if this would lead to more equality overall. 

Press Release

14-06-2022: What motivates us humans - Portrait of a researcher in Neuroeconomics: Christian Ruff

Christian Ruff is a Professor of Neuroeconomics and Decision Neuroscience at the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. He leads the Neuroeconomics and Decision Neuroscience group that studies the neural mechanisms required to make decisions. The research draws on decision theories from economics and mathematical psychology. To this end, a multi-method approach is used that includes behavioral experiments, computational modeling, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation methods. The goal is to develop neurocomputational models of the brain processes that causally control our decisions. 

YouTube Video

07-03-2022: Even a little alcohol may be bad for the brain

According to a recent study in "Nature Communications", even moderate alcohol consumption is associated with a smaller brain volume and a reduced mass of grey and white brain matter.

It is well known that chronic excessive alcohol abuse is detrimental to health. However, the evidence to date is contradictory as to whether light to moderate alcohol consumption could have similar negative consequences.

Gökhan Aydogan, a postdoctoral researcher at the Zurich Center for Neuroeconomics, was part of the international and interdisciplinary research team that studied a huge sample of 36,678 adults from the UK. "We already found negative associations between alcohol consumption and brain structure in people who consumed only one to two units of alcohol per day," he summarizes the findings. In the study, one pint of beer or a large glass of wine was considered to be two units of alcohol.

Effects are worse the more you drink

The study offers evidence that the effects of alcohol consumption on the brain are exponential. Gökhan Aydogan explains: "The last beer is not only responsible for the hangover, but also has a greater negative effect on brain ageing than all the previous ones consumed that day".

The researchers assume that brain of people consuming one unit of alcohol per day age around 1 year more than the brains of people who consume no alcohol at all. At four units per day, the difference in brain ageing is ten years.

The authors emphasize, however, that the study was not designed to establish a causal relationship between alcohol consumption and the change in brain structure, i.e. to prove a cause-effect relationship. Further studies on this would therefore be of great interest.

Article in Nature Communications

Additional Information

Media Archives