Based upon an article by Lauran Neergaard
Associated Press
September 14, 2001
Emotions, not logical or analytical reasoning, are the key to moral judgments, according to researches at Princeton University.
"Most of the important social and political issues that divide people are really moral issues. And moral reasoning is highly structured by the structure of our brain," said Joshua Green, a Princeton philosophy graduate student who led the experiment.
People were put into brain scanners while answering a battery of 60 questions. Scans revealed which sections of the brain were active as participants answered various ethical dilemmas.
Dr. Jonathan Cohen, co-author of the study, is the director of Princeton's Center for the Study of the Brain.
According to Dr. Cohen, the brain scans reveal the portions of the brain responsible for logic are minimally active during moral and ethical discussions, unless the discussion is purely theoretical.
"That suggest the emotions are really acting as interference," Cohen said.
People used emotion-related brain areas in deciding the personal moral questions more than when they decided the impersonal or non-moral questions.
"We carry out our lives as though our moral judgments are based on reason, but instead people act on gut feelings and make up the reasons post hoc," said Jonathan Haidth, social and cultural psychologist at the University of Virginia.
The few individuals who made decisions based upon an analysis of situations took far longer to make their decisions. In real-life situations, such deliberations might not be possible.
Example dilemma:
1. A runaway train will kill five people unless you flip a switch sending it onto another track where it will kill only one. You do not know the people and must assume all are of equal social importance.
2. The only way to stop this same train is to push someone onto the tracks.
3. You must sacrifice yourself to stop the train.
The majority of test respondents would flip the rail switch in the first version of the dilemma. However, they would not push someone onto the tracks. Only if given a great deal of time to ponder the question would test subjects select self-sacrifice.
Results of the Study appear in the September 2001 edition of Science.