Brain Stimulations Can Influence Morality

In a new scientific investigation, researchers were amazed to see the effects that brain stimulation can have on a person's sense of morality. Though they hypothesized even before the work began that they might see such a result, they were quite surprised at the final conclusions. They learned that applying brain stimulation to a certain area of the cortex resulted in people finding hypothetical crimes more morally acceptable than they would have under normal circumstances.

The test participants were presented with scenarios in which people were presented performing various actions. They were then asked to quantify whether they found the actions morally acceptable. Generally, when dealing with situations such as learning about a murder, people tend to collect more information about the events before they pass on judgments about the assailant's actions. For instance, if they learn that the attacker was defending his- or herself from harm, or if the crime was unintentional, then they are more likely to find the scenario morally acceptable.

Generally, the largest amount of blame is placed on an antisocial behavior if it's unintentional and unwarranted. But, in the new study, when participants were subjected to electrical stimulation to a certain area of their brain, they were more likely to find even intentional negative behaviors more acceptable than usual. The researchers say that attempted harms were the most likely situations to be qualified as “not that bad” by those who received stimulation. One of the scenarios the team proposed, for example, referred to intentional attempts of poisoning another human being.

“It was still surprising to us that we were able to actually change people's moral judgments by disrupting activity in this specific brain region, just because moral judgment is obviously really complicated and depends on a number of factors. So the kind of precise deficit that we found was really striking,” says Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) postdoctoral researcher Liane Young, who was also the author of the new investigation. Additional details of the study appear in this week's issue of the respected publication Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), LiveScience reports.

The cortical area most prone to influence was identified to be the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ). The MIT group applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the TPJ, and watched how people changed their moral values almost immediately. “They judged failed attempts to harm, where no harm was actually done, as more permissible, and accidents, where harm was actually done in spite of a good intention, as [more] morally forbidden,” Young concludes.