Coragyps

<a href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pubnews.php" target="_blank">Eurekalert</a> has an item today ( go to the link and scroll down to "Emory brain imaging...." - I can't make the actual article link) on a study that "...shows, for the first time, that social cooperation is intrinsically rewarding to the human brain, even in the face of pressures to the contrary. It suggests that the altruistic drive to cooperate is biologically embedded-- either genetically programmed or acquired through socialization during childhood and adolescence."
The researchers took MRI scans of people playing "prisoner's dilemma," where they can cooperate with another person to get a reward, or fink on that person and get a larger reward. Most people will cooperate, and the scans identified parts of the brain that are active when they do so. So possibly being a "moral" person is really its own reward - we make endorphins or some such when we do good - and we really, truly don't need as many rules as some would like us all to have.

What would be incredibly interesting (but pretty Orwellian) is to tease out how these reward circuits work or fail to work in people who are habitual a**holes - those who don't engage in altruistic behavior.

lpetrich

I would not be surprised if our species had some "sociality instinct". But disentangling instinct and learned behavior can be difficult when shared circumstances make the same behavior always worth learning.

Thus, if one carries water in a cup, one has to keep the cup's open end pointing upwards, otherwise, the water will spill out. This is universal, yet it is very likely learned; I wonder if anyone has studied how little children learn this important fact.

Also, instinct does not preclude learning. There is good reason to believe that our species has some sort of "language instinct"; however, the details of natural languages vary enormously.