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Chicago: Paying people a compliment appears to activate the same reward centre in the brain as paying them cash, Japanese researchers said.
They said the study offers scientific support for the long-held assumption that people get a psychological boost from having a good reputation. "We found that these seemingly different kinds of rewards - a good reputation versus money - are biologically coded by the same neural structure, the striatum," said Dr. Norihiro Sadato of the Japanese National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan. In the first experiment, people played a game in which they were told one of three cards would yield a payout. In another experiment, people were told they were being evaluated by strangers. The payouts and compliments from strangers triggered activity in a reward-related area of the brain, said Sadato, whose study appears in the journal Neuron.
A study by Caroline Zink of the National Institute of Mental Health found the same brain region was active when people were processing information about social status. The researchers created a social hierarchy in which participants played an interactive game for money. They were assigned a social status they were told was based on their skill. Zink and colleagues saw increased activity in the brain's reward centre when people won money or saw their social standing rise.
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