Summarizing and Reflecting on: An Fmri Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgement

In a modern society like ours, there are often questions that arise dealing with what is acceptable and what is not, what makes something more justifiable than something else or why is Event A normal while Event B is not? These questions arise everyday in our lives, and while the answers remain unknown to some, psychologists believe that our emotions we have are tied with what we believe is moral. In an article entitled An fMRI Investigation of Emotional Engagement in Moral Judgement, it discusses why sacrificing one life to save five is appropriate in one situation, but not in another. In scenario one, it is described that a trolley is on a runway, about to hit and kill five people. It is in your power that you click a switch to make the trolley switch ways to sacrifice and kill one person. Do you? In scenario two, it is described that there are five people on a bridge, and a trolley is headed for them. Again, it is in your power to decide whether you push one person in front to stop it or let it kill the other five. Do you?

Most people can say that scenario one is more moral than scenario two because their actions are not directly linked to the death of the person. Psychologists and philosophers hypothesis that when a person’s actions are directly related to the cause, there is a greater sense of that particular situation being deemed as non moral compared to a situation where there actions are not directly linked. Additionally, they believe that a person undergoes a greater amount of emotional processing when their actions deliberately cause the effect, which ultimately can influence a person’s judgement.

METHODS

In order to test out these theories and figure out what can be and is considered acceptable two experiments were done. In the presents of the each experiment, a selected group of people were asked whether each of the sixty proposed questions were moral or non moral based on their opinions, the questions being the independent variable and the outcomes for each experiment being the dependent variable.

In the first experiment those involved were asked a series of questions that were grouped into moral-personal relating to the footbridge dilemma and moral-impersonal relating to the trolley dilemma. With the given questions, the participants had to decide whether the situation at stake was socially appropriate or not.

For the second experiment concluded by the researchers, an exact replica of questions were asked to the selected group. The researchers this time focused on the amount of time it took a certain person to respond to the given question.

DISCUSSION

What the researchers had found after concluding the first experiment was that the areas associated with the working/short term memory had become less active during the times of emotional processing compared periods of cognitive processing. Having said that, the Brodmann’s Area (BA) 46 and BA 7/40 were notably less active in the moral-personal condition than in the other two conditions provided. However, there was no significant differences found correlating between the moral-impersonal and the non-moral condition in the B39, B46 and B7/40 areas of the brain.

The results found after collecting the data were almost exact to