Fwd: Neurosci Response Paper
Monica L. Rodriguez
From: Jen Vosilla <jenvo...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 8, 2010 at 9:57 PM
Subject: Neurosci Response Paper
To: mon...@albany.edu
Hey Monica. I had to change email addresses so I'm no longer part of the neuroscience google group. I sent a request for the group, but until I'm in it, I can't email my response to everyone. Sorry!
Anyway, I focused on the Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley & Cohen (2001). The authors introduce two scenarios plaguing contemporary moral philosophers in which an individual can choose to sacrifice one person to save five people. First, we have the Trolley Dilemma where a runaway trolley will kill 5 people on its current course and the only way to save them is to flip a switch to change the path it takes; however, this will subsequently kill 1 person. In the Footbridge Dilemma the runaway trolley threatens to once again kill five people that are hanging out on the tracks, but the only way to save them this time is to push the large stranger next to you off the bridge and onto the tracks. Both scenarios ask people to choose how many people will die, one or five. The problem lies in why most people respond that they will push the button, but not the large stranger thus sacrificing one in the Trolley Dilemma and killing five by failing to make the sacrifice in the Footbridge Dilemma. The authors take a psychological view in determining that the discrepancy in answers can be explained by the difference in the emotion automatically provoked by the scenarios. The emotional component affects people’s judgments on the course of action that should be taken.
The authors conducted 2 experiments with 9 participants each (Why not just 1 study with 18 participants?? Unless the “planned comparisons” were not actually identified beforehand) with each participant judging whether an action in 60 different dilemmas was appropriate or inappropriate. The moral dilemmas were judged by 2 coders on 3 criteria to identify which were personal ((1) could reasonably be expected to lead to serious bodily harm (2) to a particular person or a member or members of a particular group of people (3) where this harm is not the result of deflecting an existing threat onto a different party) and which were impersonal. They predicted that brain areas associated with emotion would be more active during judgments of moral-personal scenarios (such as the footbridge dilemma) relative to moral-impersonal scenarios (trolley dilemma). It is also predicted that the few individuals that would choose to push the stranger onto the tracks in the footbridge dilemma are hypothesized to take a longer time to respond as they must overcome their initial emotional response.
Experiment 1 Results: Planned comparisons revealed sig more activity in areas linked to emotion in medial frontal gyrus, posterior singulate gyrus and bilateral activation in angular gyrus in the moral-person than in moral-impersonal and non-moral. Also, areas associated with working memory are found to be less active during emotional processing and in accordance, there was significantly less activation during the moral-personal scenarios.
Experiment 2 Results: Replicated findings from experiment 1, except that no significant differences were found between the moral-impersonal and non-moral scenarios in the medial frontal gyrus and middle frontal gyrus. As predicted, response times were significantly slower when participants made the emotionally incongruent response “appropriate” to moral-personal dilemmas relative to responding “inappropriate”. No significant differences were found other two conditions.
Basically, this study found support that moral judgments may be affected by automatic emotional responses and that judgments on impersonal moral dilemmas may be more closely related to judgments non-moral dilemmas. I will leave you with the question they pose, “How will a better understanding of the mechanisms that give rise to our moral judgments alter our attitudes toward the moral judgments we make?”