Английский язык: практика ведения дискуссий (190,00 руб.)

УДК 811.11:51(076.5) ББК Ш143.21я73 ©ЯрГУ, 2012 2 UNIT 1 Paul Zak: Trust, morality and oxytocin URL:http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/paul_zak_trust_morality_and_oxytocin.html Is there anything unique about human beings? <...> We're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments. <...> We're obsessed with morality as social creatures. <...> We need to know why people are doing what they're doing. <...> As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense, and I learned to say phrases in Latin, but I also had time to think about whether my mother's top-down morality applied to everybody. <...> I thought, maybe there's some earthly basis for moral decisions. <...> But I wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral. <...> I want to know if there's a chemistry of morality. <...> I want to know if there was a moral molecule. <...> So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals. <...> In rodents, it was known to make mothers care for their offspring, and in some creatures, allowed for toleration of burrowmates. <...> So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule. <...> In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral. <...> Now luckily, oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood, so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery. <...> So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness, I might help alleviate poverty. <...> So in fact, experimental economists had run this test around the world, and for much higher stakes, and the consensus view was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust, and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness. <...> Well, by measuring oxytocin we found that the more money the second person received, the more their brain produced oxytocin, and the more oxytocin on board, the more money they returned. <...> So we have a biology of trustworthiness. <...> I didn't know for sure oxytocin caused trustworthiness. <...> So to make the experiment, I knew I'd have to go into the brain <...>