Citation de Apoapo
4. « […] even if you dismiss charitable giving as ultimately selfish – saying that people give to charity in order to enhance their reputations – you still do not solve the problem because you then have to explain why it does enhance their reputations. Why do other people applaud charitable activity ? We are immersed so deeply in a sea of moral assumptions that it takes an effort to imagine a world without them. A world without obligations to reciprocate, deal fairly, and trust other people would be simply inconceivable.
Psychologists, therefore, are converging with Robert Frank's economic argument that emotions are mental devices for guaranteeing commitment. But perhaps the most remarkable convergence comes from the study of broken brains. There is a small part of the prefrontal lobe of the human brain, which, when damaged, turns you into a rational fool. People who have lost that part of their brain are superficially normal. They suffer no paralysis, no speech defect, no loss in their senses, no diminution in their memory or general intelligence. They do just as well in psychological tests as they did before their accident. Yet their lives fall apart for reasons that seem more psychiatric than neurological […]. They fail to hold down jobs, lose their inhibitions, and become paralytically indecisive. » (p. 143)
Psychologists, therefore, are converging with Robert Frank's economic argument that emotions are mental devices for guaranteeing commitment. But perhaps the most remarkable convergence comes from the study of broken brains. There is a small part of the prefrontal lobe of the human brain, which, when damaged, turns you into a rational fool. People who have lost that part of their brain are superficially normal. They suffer no paralysis, no speech defect, no loss in their senses, no diminution in their memory or general intelligence. They do just as well in psychological tests as they did before their accident. Yet their lives fall apart for reasons that seem more psychiatric than neurological […]. They fail to hold down jobs, lose their inhibitions, and become paralytically indecisive. » (p. 143)