Study examines the brain during a moral decision

There are five people in an elevator plummeting down the elevator shaft. The cable has snapped and you, an observer, hold in your hand a switch to engage the emergency-brake. By throwing the switch you can save those five lives; however, throwing the switch means that a maintenance worker will perish instead. Would you throw the switch?

Now imagine that the scenario was changed slightly. Envision now that you stand next to the maintenance worker in the basement of the building. Instead of an emergency switch, which can halt the elevator and save those five lives, there is only a series of gears which can engage the emergency-brake if something large to jam them is thrown in. Your body is not big enough to halt the gears, but if you were to push the maintenance worker into the gears it would halt the elevator. Could you push the worker into the gears, killing him, in order to save the lives of the five people on the elevator?

Moral philosophers and psychologists claim that the majority of people would answer yes to the initial question and no the latter, even though both questions ask you to trade the life of one person for those of five. The issue of why these two situations are treated differently has been the subject of a heated philosophical debate for decades, but a recent study has found that the answer, at least in part, may lie in the workings of the brain.

The study, which is published in the September issue of Science, explains that the two moral dilemmas engage different areas of the brain. The first is considered an impersonal dilemma, and is dealt with by a region of the brain which usually processes memory. The second is dealt with by an area of the brain that handles emotions, temporarily suppressing the memory regions of the brain.

According to Dr. Jonathan Cohen of Princeton University, a collaborator, the study provides insight into why people of varying cultural backgrounds can arrive at different conclusions about the same moral dilemmas. If people's emotions are influenced by their backgrounds this study may help provide some understanding as to why these people make different judgments about what is right and wrong.

Dr. Stephen Stich, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Rutgers, explains that the findings are applicable to philosophy as well. Though moral philosophy examines ethics and logic and not emotion and biology, the study helps provide a link to comprehending people's real-life feelings about life and death issues.

The study, conceived by Joshua Greene, a philosophy graduate student at Princeton, put forth 60 moral dilemmas to two groups of nine subjects being monitored in imaging machines. When certain regions of the subjects? brain were activated, they lit up as compared to the non-active regions. Both personal and impersonal moral dilemmas were presented to the subjects who in turn pressed a button to indicate whether or not they judged to chosen action to be fitting.

Personal dilemmas suppressed the memory regions of the brain and activated areas dealing with emotions. However, these were not the typical emotion centers of the brain, but rather areas in the front and middle of the brain which have been shown to be associated with high order emotional processing. Nonetheless, it was also found that while the emotional responses to the stimuli could not be suppressed, other regions of the reasoning brain can override them.

Perhaps the results of this study can be best summed up in the words of Dr. Cohen, "We have not solved the philosophical question of why people choose different solutions to a logically identical problem; Our contribution is to understand the psychology of moral reasoning.