Okay, say you’re standing near some train tracks. In the distance, you see a trolley coming along, and up ahead, you see five workers on the tracks. For some reason they don’t see the trolley coming (I don’t know, their backs are turned and their machinery is loud or something… it’s a hypothetical, just roll with it), so they are sure to be killed. Lookind around, you spy a lever that would switch the trolley to a different track and spare those five people. But! There’s one person on that other track, who will meet with certain death. So, do you flip the lever?
Dr. Joshua Greene, a neuroscientist studying the basis of moral decisionmaking, poses this question to his research subjects and uses a brain scanner to determine which areas “light up” as the answer is being formulated. Greene says the great majority of people say yes, of course I’d flip the lever, because killing one person is better than killing five. Then he asks another question:
This time you’re standing on a footbridge overlooking the tracks. From your vantage point, you can see the trolley approaching and you also see the same five oblivious workers who will soon perish. But you happen to be standing next to a large man. If you shove the large man off the bridge and onto the tracks, you’ll save the five workers (because the trolley will stop after it hits and kills the large man). So, do you shove the man onto the tracks?
Pretty much everyone says no. Because even though the math is the same (kill one person to save five people), and even though, essentially, you’re committing murder in both cases, there is something about *shoving* a person that feels different than flipping a lever—something that makes it vastly more offensive.
Greene says the something has to do with “basic primate morality,” in other words, a sense of right and wrong inherited from our deep, evolutionary past. His conclusion is based on the fact that although he’s asking his subjects essentially the same question (would you kill one person to save five others?), completely different areas of the brain light up in each case. The “actuarial” or “accounting” part of the brain is activated for the first question, but the more primitive “chimp brain” is activated for the second. Greene believes human morality is the result of these two areas “duking it out.”
You can hear Greene discuss his research in a really good interview on Radio Lab (the first 13 minutes of the “Chimp Fights and Trolley Rides” feature). It’s pretty fascinating, especially when you realize it’s the chimp part of the brain arguing the kneejerk humane response (don’t shove!) and the more “civilized” brain that says, well, one dead worker is okay. “We think of basic human morality as being handed down from on high,” Greene explains, “but it’s probably better to say it’s handed up from below.”
Photo credit: #4 (Meaghan) on Flickr.
this blows my mind.
Or is it because the “chimp part of the brain” can’t process ‘5 > 1′?
Hmmmm…my kneejerk reaction in both situations was that I could step/jump in front of the trolley to stop it, and perhaps because I knew it was coming I might survive. The math is even more logical–one dead, six rescued.
Wonder why that wasn’t one of the options listed……
One of the problems faced by military commanders in the field has long been that most people have a strong gut reaction against firing their weapon at another person, no matter how much they’ve been conditioned to do so without hesitation. Various methods have been tried with some success to raise the percentage of willing trigger-pullers (including changing the words used to describe the act, which met with some limited success), but by far the biggest gains have been achieved by creating exactly the same sort of technological remove described by the switch in this example. Bomber pilots, for instance, have much less resistance to hitting the little switch that drops the bombs, even though they are undoubtably aware that doing so will cause a much greater loss of life than a lone shooter could. Presumably this is a function of this very same psychological mechanism.
[...] September 18, 2007 Filed under: Belief Systems, Identity — brangien @ 1:18pm Remember the moral dilemma on the train tracks we were talking about back in July? Today the New York Times features more research in the field of [...]