Messing with Morality

(PHOTO:Christine Daniloff)

Having a hard time deciding if someone’s actions are morally right or wrong? Huh. Have a group of MIT neuroscientists used transcranial magnetic stimulation to mess with the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) of your brain lately?

In one experiment, volunteers were exposed to TMS for 25 minutes before taking a test in which they read a series of scenarios and made moral judgments of characters’ actions on a scale of one (absolutely forbidden) to seven (absolutely permissible).

In a second experiment, TMS was applied in 500-milisecond bursts at the moment when the subject was asked to make a moral judgment. For example, subjects were asked to judge how permissible it is for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knows to be unsafe, even if she ends up making it across safely. In such cases, a judgment based solely on the outcome would hold the perpetrator morally blameless, even though it appears he intended to do harm.

In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible.

More detail on these startling revelations here.