red states rule
Senior Member
- May 30, 2006
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Did our tax dollars pay for this crap?
Paying taxes feels good, say researchers.
The surprising discovery, based on brain scans, can also predict which people are most likely to donate cash to charity.
Bill Harbaugh at the University of Oregon in Eugene, US, and colleagues gave 19 female university students $100, and told them some of this money would have to go towards taxes.
Each volunteer then read a series of 60 separate taxation scenarios involving $0 to $45 in taxes, knowing that one of the scenarios would be selected at random and the related amount be subtracted from their $100.
Secret pleasure
As the participants viewed the tax scenarios, their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Surprisingly, whenever the students read the taxation scenarios, scientists saw a spike in activity within two of the brain's reward centres the nucleus accumbens and caudate nucleus.
Harbaugh says that people probably like paying taxes more than they admit. He believes the results of his new study help explain the widespread compliance with tax laws. "We like to complain about it, but based on what we do, we are not as opposed to it as we like to say," Harbaugh says.
Economist Robert Frank of Cornell University comments that tax-paying might stimulate positive feelings in the brain because the process helps equalise the burden of helping others.
Harbaugh then repeated the experiment, but instead of the money being given in taxation, the scenarios related to charity donations, and the participants could choose to give their money.
For tha complete article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12068-paying-taxes-is-a-pleasurable-duty.html
Paying taxes feels good, say researchers.
The surprising discovery, based on brain scans, can also predict which people are most likely to donate cash to charity.
Bill Harbaugh at the University of Oregon in Eugene, US, and colleagues gave 19 female university students $100, and told them some of this money would have to go towards taxes.
Each volunteer then read a series of 60 separate taxation scenarios involving $0 to $45 in taxes, knowing that one of the scenarios would be selected at random and the related amount be subtracted from their $100.
Secret pleasure
As the participants viewed the tax scenarios, their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Surprisingly, whenever the students read the taxation scenarios, scientists saw a spike in activity within two of the brain's reward centres the nucleus accumbens and caudate nucleus.
Harbaugh says that people probably like paying taxes more than they admit. He believes the results of his new study help explain the widespread compliance with tax laws. "We like to complain about it, but based on what we do, we are not as opposed to it as we like to say," Harbaugh says.
Economist Robert Frank of Cornell University comments that tax-paying might stimulate positive feelings in the brain because the process helps equalise the burden of helping others.
Harbaugh then repeated the experiment, but instead of the money being given in taxation, the scenarios related to charity donations, and the participants could choose to give their money.
For tha complete article:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12068-paying-taxes-is-a-pleasurable-duty.html
