As shown in this functional MRI image, the amygdala, a part of the brain involved in processing emotions, is more active in people who are blaming others for their negative actions. Credit: Lawrence Ngo
Judgment hinges on whether action was intentional or unintentional. We constantly read others’ intentions in what they do, especially political candidates. The Duke study is “the first to use neuroscience research tools to try to explain why people are biased toward treating negative actions as intentional but positive actions as unintentional,” said Lawrence Ngo.
Take this scenario commonly used in the field of experimental philosophy: The CEO knew the plan would harm the environment, but he did not care at all about the effect the plan would have on the environment. He started the plan solely to increase profits. Did the CEO intentionally harm the environment?
If you said ‘yes,’ then you align with the majority: In previously published work, 82% responded that the CEO was deliberate. When the researchers replaced the single word “harm” with “help” in the scenario, however, only 23% deemed the CEO’s actions intentional. The research team found similar results when they posed numerous similar situations to study participants.
“There’s no logical reason why we would call something intentional, just because it causes a bad outcome as opposed to a good outcome,” said Prof Scott Huettel. To understand why, Huettel’s team assessed differences in personality traits and other psychological measures. Using fMRI they also analyzed activity of individuals’ brains while they read the scenarios.
Results: People use 2 different mechanisms to judge how intentional an action was. If the action produced a negative effect, participants were more likely to draw on brain areas involved in processing emotion (especially the amygdala).
The greater the emotional reaction the participant reported having to a particular story, the stronger it activated their amygdala. But if an action produced a positive effect, it was less likely to set off the amygdala.
For +ve outcomes people relied less on emotion and more on statistics. ie they thought about how often people in a particular situation would behave in a similar way. In the example of the CEO who makes a profit and also helps the environment, participants were more likely to say that because CEOs commonly aim to make money, helping the environment was an unintentional side-effect.
How intentional a crime was often affects the final ruling, and broader moral judgments. But the new study, Huettel said, shows that the arrow can go in both directions: Moral judgments about whether an action harmed others can influence judgments about how intentional that action was in the first place. More generally, “the most rewarding part of the work was how seeing how the intersection between philosophy and neuroscience gave us new insights about both fields,” Ngo said. Huettel and his collaborators are planning new studies on trust, deception and altruism. http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-12/du-bse120315.php
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