own and common 23.03.2022

The desire to spend one's resources wisely and at the same time to deplete the general reserves is associated with the peculiarities of the work of pleasure centers.

Let's imagine that we have a huge stock of something at home, but at the same time we go to the store and race with others trying to get the last packages of the same thing, from which all the shelves are bursting with us. On the one hand, the behavior is rather strange, on the other hand, it can be reasonably noted here that, due to the general uncertainty, it is wiser to save your reserves, and while there is an opportunity, use common resources. True, the same thing happens without any uncertainty. So, in 1968, it was noticed that public pastures in Scotland were trampled and eaten clean - farmers, at every opportunity, tried to drive their cattle to a common field so as not to touch their land, and as a result, public pastures simply became unusable. Another example is what is happening with the fishing industry: even if the fishermen have their own large resources that no one else can touch, they prefer to fish in public waters. According to statistics, fish stocks in public waters in some places have fallen by 95%, while in private resources it is not at all noticeable that someone is taking fish from them.

Again, if we talk at the level of everyday experience, then there is nothing surprising in the fact that we prefer to use up the general reserves, and leave our own for later. But the employees of the Higher School of Economics and the University of Basel were interested in what happens in the brain. The experiment involved fifty people who caught virtual fish in virtual ponds and sold them to virtual buyers; money for the sale of fish was not virtual, but real. The ponds in the game either belonged to the player herself, or were common property. If the participant in the experiment fished at home, he had to take into account the migration of fish, due to which the catch decreased from time to time. If he fished in a public reservoir, then he had to take into account other anglers, because of which the fish again became smaller.

While the anglers fished, their brains were monitored using magnetic resonance imaging. When the fish in the ponds became smaller, the activity of the lower part of the striatum, or striatum, weakened in the brain. The striatum is part of a well-known system of brain centers called the reinforcement system, or the reward system. It gives us pleasant sensations in connection with achieving a goal, completing a task, obtaining a long-awaited result, etc. Actually, the lower (ventral) part of the striatum includes a nerve center called the nucleus accumbens, which also has a second name - the center of pleasure. (Although there is a lot of justice for the pleasure centers in the brain, and by and large, all nodes of the reward system can be called this.)

The depletion of resources does not allow us to achieve the goal, we do not experience any pleasure in connection with this, and even vice versa - and it is understandable why the activity of the striatum fell when the virtual fish became smaller. However, in the work of the striatum there were features that manifested themselves depending on which pond the fish was caught from. When fish were caught in their own pond, the pleasure center ensured that there were enough fish left in the pond to support the population - that is, the activity of the pleasure center changed so that the angler did not go beyond a certain line in his greed.

If the fish were caught in a common reservoir, then the pleasure center reacted not to the amount of fish left, but to how many competitors caught it. And if the fisherman saw that there were less and less fish in the common pond, this only pushed him to catch more and more, not paying attention to the possible depletion of the resource. That is, as we see, different economic behavior depends on one of the centers of pleasure, which analyzes socio-economic circumstances, trying to extract the maximum benefit from them.

It is easy to see that according to the conditions of the experiment, the fishermen could not negotiate with each other. Naturally, in this case, by default, you think that everyone else is pursuing only their own benefit, and if you start catching fewer fish, then you won’t save the fish, and you yourself will remain in the cold with a smaller catch. But if all of a sudden fishermen get together and reach some kind of agreement (as happens more or less all over the world, and not only in fishing, but in general in other sectors of the economy), they will not need to feverishly monitor each other and catch from under their noses each other's miserable remnants of a common fish. It is quite possible that the activity of the centers of the reinforcement system also somehow changes during the conclusion and observance of the contract, and it would be interesting to see how.