Charity: It's not a no-brainer.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

Researchers at the University of Oregon have found a connection between acts of charity and a pleasure center deep in the brain, a discovery that offers new insight into why people help others.

Economics professor Bill Harbaugh, psychology professor Ulrich Mayr and graduate student Dan Burghart have discovered that giving away money makes people feel good by activating primitive pleasure nodes associated with basic needs. The results show that charitable giving, even just seeing someone else's money being given, pleases people in much the same way as eating, being with friends or even falling in love.

The experiments found that even mandatory giving - think taxes, but going to a worthy cause, such as a food bank - lights up the pleasure center, but by less than when the donation is voluntary. Perhaps even more surprising, the researchers found they could determine which people are more likely to give voluntarily by seeing how their brains reacted when they were given money and when a charity was given money.

"That difference in brain activity actually predicts whether you'll give voluntarily or not," Harbaugh said. "That's what blew me away about these results."

The study is being published in the current issue of Science magazine, one of the most prominent and widely read science journals. The two professors have been swamped with interview requests from around the world since advance copies of the study were released earlier this week.

The research breaks new ground by showing the connection between charity and the brain centers known as the caudate nucleus and nucleus accumbens, two evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain that date back at least to the earliest mammals. The areas play a central role in the brain's reward system that responds to the satisfaction of basic needs, such as food, social contact and shelter.

Harbaugh and Mayr conducted experiments using 19 college-age women who were placed in a magnetic resonance imaging machine that mapped brain activation. The women were given $100 and shown different scenarios on a computer screen in which some of the money was taken away for no reason or for donation to the local charity FOOD for Lane County, or the money was given to the women with the option of giving any or all of it to the charity or keeping it for themselves.

In another scenario, subjects saw money being given to the food bank without any being taken from them. That helped show how people react to charity as a concept rather than as a personal choice.

And the scenarios weren't just make-believe; each subject actually got a hundred real dollars and walked out with any money that was not taken or given away, while FOOD for Lane County got the money that was donated.

Using the brain scans, the researchers could identify subjects as "altruists" or "egoists" depending on the amount of activity in the reward centers under different scenarios. The fact that the centers were active even when giving was mandatory indicated that at some level people really are pure altruists and get pleasure from seeing a charity get money to support its good works, Harbaugh said.

"When the money goes to FOOD for Lane County you actually see more activity, so this is evidence of pure altruism," Mayr said, noting that people felt good even though all donations were kept anonymous. "You feel better in this primitive reward area."

The research also showed neurological evidence of the economic theory known as "warm glow" giving, in which voluntary giving - when people know their own decision made the difference - produces a higher sense of well-being. The researchers said that showed up in the higher amount of activity when subjects gave voluntarily.

"If you don't have any say in it, you don't have any glow," Mayr said. "You need to feel some responsibility to get the warm glow."

Perhaps not surprisingly, the research itself was made possible by someone's warm glow. The UO's MRI facility, the Lewis Center for NeuroImaging, is the product of a charitable donation from Robert and Beverly Lewis.

But lest anyone think that the research suggests that society could eliminate taxes and rely on people's desire for the warm glow to bring in enough money to fund public needs, it doesn't. In the experiments, the total amount people gave voluntarily was less than what they were assessed as mandatory "taxes."

"Voluntary giving is good for the giver, but it doesn't always provide enough for the recipients," Harbaugh said.

But it does provide some insights that could be used in tax policy debates. For example, it shows that not all taxes are seen as bad; in the future, it might even help sort out long-standing questions over fair ways to impose taxes.

"This captures exactly the tension policy-makers face across the country," Harbaugh said. "I think this type of work provides a technique to maybe answer some of those questions."

Dr. Stephanie Brown, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan who has done research on altruistic behavior, said the study's results are completely consistent with other research in the area. She said it helps explain why people are willing to help others even though we often behave as though giving is painful.

"When we think about giving we think about it as costly; we think about it as taxing; we think about it as something that takes an emotional toll," Brown said. "So the idea that when we give it actually makes us feel good is interesting in that context."

But much more work remains to be done. Mayr and Harbaugh already are seeking grants to expand the research to study a wider range of people and financial situations; they also want to know how much weight information from the pleasure centers of the brain carries in the decision-making process.

And what about the old phrase "give 'til it hurts'? At the least, the new study shows that if people think giving hurts, perhaps it's only because it hurts so good.

"Giving money away certainly makes you feel happier," Mayr said.