spike in their brain’s reward systems. Similar findings have been revealed by researchers at Shenzhen University. Twenty-two participants were asked to play a simple computer game, then told (falsely) they were a ‘two-star player’. Next, in a brain scanner, they were shown pictures of various ‘one-star’ and ‘three-star’ players receiving what looked to be painful facial injections. Afterwards, they claimed to have felt empathy for all the injectees. But their scans betrayed the lie: they only tended to experience empathy for the lower status ‘one-star’ players.
