The Emerging Moral Psychology -- Dan Jones Prospect Magazine
What is going on in the brain when people mull over these different scenarios? Thinking through cases like the Trolley Problem--what Greene calls an impersonal moral dilemma as it involves no direct violence against another person--increases activity in brain regions located in the prefrontal cortex that are associated with deliberative reasoning and cognitive control (so-called executive functions). This pattern of activity suggests that impersonal moral dilemmas such as the Trolley Problem are treated as straightforward rational problems: how to maximise the number of lives saved. By contrast, brain imaging of the Footbridge Problem--a personal dilemma that invokes up-close and personal violence--tells a rather different story. Along with the brain regions activated in the Trolley Problem, areas known to process negative emotional responses also crank up their activity. In these more difficult dilemmas, people take much longer to make a decision and their brains show patterns of activity indicating increased emotional and cognitive conflict within the brain as the two appalling options are weighed up.
What is going on in the brain when people mull over these different scenarios? Thinking through cases like the Trolley Problem--what Greene calls an impersonal moral dilemma as it involves no direct violence against another person--increases activity in brain regions located in the prefrontal cortex that are associated with deliberative reasoning and cognitive control (so-called executive functions). This pattern of activity suggests that impersonal moral dilemmas such as the Trolley Problem are treated as straightforward rational problems: how to maximise the number of lives saved. By contrast, brain imaging of the Footbridge Problem--a personal dilemma that invokes up-close and personal violence--tells a rather different story. Along with the brain regions activated in the Trolley Problem, areas known to process negative emotional responses also crank up their activity. In these more difficult dilemmas, people take much longer to make a decision and their brains show patterns of activity indicating increased emotional and cognitive conflict within the brain as the two appalling options are weighed up.
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