The Contribution of Medial Prefrontal Cortex to Moral Decision Making, Giuseppe Di Pellegrino

[@danielamainardi9689]

Always a great teacher .

[@p.bamygdala2139]

Great talk! Thanks! And thanks for posting it. This was the first video on the list when I searched KZbin for “ventral medial prefrontal cortex”. But . . . I have a big, big problem with the train dilemma as a test of moral judgement. I wish it were taken out of psychological testing, everywhere, forever. There are just far too many variables that make it unreliable. It’s not an either-or, Boolean type operant as it is always presented. For example: a person who will flip a switch to save more lives implicitly understands what a “switch” is, how train track switches work (at an operational level) and can appreciate, even at a lay level, the Boolean situation they are presented with. Conversely, the person who pushes someone over the bridge and onto the tracks has no assurance that said action will save the lives of the others. No matter how much you assuage them that it will work, in this instance the mind gets stuck on its initial presuppositions, because we don’t KNOW that falling bodies do the trick, but we do know switches. It’s not intuitive what a body will do, so really you’re testing the ACC here on grounds of accepting complexity, and limbic system to trust the authority who insists it will work, not the dmPFC or vmPFC. It’s not simple like a Boolean train switch. The falling person could veer, could roll upon landing, could fail to provide the task required. These things matter in the mind of the person taking the test, on the receiving end of the heavy moral question. There’s also the factor of how we want to be perceived in the testing room. We might not want to be painted as pusher. Consider before running this test, showing groups a “newspaper clipping” of the story already having happened, and gage their moral reaction to the decision of another committing the push. THEN, find out what they would have done in that situation. There are also the factors of public accountability. Flipping a switch might not be seen by anyone. One can imagine that it takes place much farther down the track, or behind some bushes. You might have moral invisibility. Even if your flip-switching was witnessed, it might be perceived as unrelated, or attempting to slow the train down, or some other action where you were seen as trying to save ALL parties. And, you still might be able to come up with a reasonable excuse about what you were ‘trying’ to do. However, getting caught pushing a person would be a clear act of aggression, too many layers separated from your goal of reducing deaths. The EMOTIONAL impact of seeing you push a person would be so overwhelming to a witness whom we could imagine existing, that said witness would be incapable of calming down enough to empathize with your choice and find you not-guilty. So “not pushing” is self preservation against public opinion and possible aggressive prosecution. And, there’s the issue of hope. With the switch, there’s the possibility that the lone person could still get off the track in time. It doesn’t matter if the experimenter sets up the situation otherwise. We humans still feel a sense of hope, of optimism, until the moment that the buzzer rings and we lost the game. The switch-flipper can justify their action in that there’s still time before the single person dies, which is time that another intervention could take place. It’s not the final action. Compare to the pusher though, and you are making the last choice in the chain. Once you’ve pushed the person over, they are dead before they even hit the ground. Time will pass where other decision options could come to light or other interventions might be made available, but you’re already committed to the murder. There’s so much more . . . The pushing of a body leaves open the possibility that one could have jumped instead, using one’s own body, heroically. This might pop into the mind of the test subject. So the push question could be perceived as “would you murder to escape self-sacrifice and a brutal death of your own”? To agree to pushing is to choose murder over both non-action AND suicide. All of this may be subconscious, but it plays a role in decision making. If one doesn’t want to think about committing suicide, which is very unpleasant, then one may simply pick the “don’t push” path to avoid the cognitive dissonance in this paradigm. And what about the test subject’s actual physical ability to push another fully grown adult? That would play a role in their confidence that they could expertly push someone in just the right way to create the perfect body-landing, or even muster the strength to overpower the victim. Would there be a struggle? Would there be a delay in the body falling? Would the person getting pushed fight back? Would our choice to push suddenly turn into a dramatic struggle for survival on a dangerous bridge? We might end up getting hurt, and even end up falling to our own deaths! Now we’re feeling ripped off for our attempts to save lives! All of these factors might subconsciously be going through the mind of the test subject, influencing their choice. And the fatal flaw in these types of thought experiments is linearity. The first question you pose sets up a situation where you are thinking about a new topic, possibly for the first time ever, and wanting to impress strangers. You pick an easy answer because it’s not so much that the train WILL kill more people if you don’t act, but rather it feels like you have to simply say whether killing more people or less is good or bad, and you feel good for having succeeded in building a relationship. When the second question comes, it changes the relationship. You thought you succeeded, but realize that you only opened the door to more complexity and difficulty. The test subject has already made one moral choice to kill, and so now may be feeling revulsion and not willing to kill again, or feeling compassion fatigue and content to kill again, or may be trying to maintain a balance on the scales that they previously established (1 life is worth it, period) so that they appear consistent. The order of presenting the two scenarios needs to be switched. I strongly recommend that a different test question needs to be created. Otherwise, you’re testing all of these variables at once, and so can’t rule any of them out.

[@terrysmith493]

In agreement with Patricia Churchland, The Brains Behind Morality (2014 Copernicus Center Lecture)