The price of your soul: How the brain decides whether to ‘sell out’

A thought provoking article i thought.

An Emory University neuro-imaging study shows that personal values that people refuse to disavow, even when offered cash to do so, are processed differently in the brain than those values that are willingly sold.

“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” Berns says. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are processed in an entirely different brain system than incentives.”

“As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains change, that affects our culture. You can’t separate the two,”