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Rudy Garns

Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment - 0 views

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    How, and for whom, does disgust influence moral judgment? In 4 experiments participants made moral judgments while experiencing extraneous feelings of disgust. Disgust was induced in Experiment 1 by exposure to a bad smell, in Experiment 2 by working in a disgusting room, in Experiment 3 by recalling a physically disgusting experience, and in Experiment 4 through a video induction. In each case, the results showed that disgust can increase the severity of moral judgments relative to controls. Experiment 4 found that disgust had a different effect on moral judgment than did sadness. In addition, Experiments 2-4 showed that the role of disgust in severity of moral judgments depends on participants' sensitivity to their own bodily sensations. Taken together, these data indicate the importance - and specificity - of gut feelings in moral judgments.
Rudy Garns

Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior - New York Times - 0 views

  • Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book “Moral Minds” that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language.
  • Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.
  • human morality would be impossible without certain emotional building blocks that are clearly at work in chimp and monkey societies
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  • other chimpanzees would console the loser.
  • Social living requires empathy
  • reconciliation
  • human morality may be severely limited by having evolved as a way of banding together against adversaries, with moral restraints being observed only toward the in group, not toward outsiders.
  • eciprocity and fairness
  • Chimps are more likely to share food with those who have groomed them.
  • These four kinds of behavior — empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking — are the basis of sociality.
  • People enforce their society’s moral codes much more rigorously with rewards, punishments and reputation building. They also apply a degree of judgment and reason, for which there are no parallels in animals.
  • Capuchin monkeys show their displeasure if given a smaller reward than a partner receives for performing the same task
  • reason is generally brought to bear only after a moral decision has been reached
  • Morality, he writes, is “a sense of right and wrong that is born out of groupwide systems of conflict management based on shared values.” The building blocks of morality are not nice or good behaviors but rather mental and social capacities for constructing societies “in which shared values constrain individual behavior through a system of approval and disapproval.”
  • Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others.
Rudy Garns

Mixing Memory : Emotion, Reason, and Moral Judgment - 0 views

  • emotion and intuition, both of which operate automatically and unconsciously for the most part, play a much larger role than most philosophers and psychologists had previously been willing to admit.
  • VMPC plays a role in encoding the reward value of stimuli, as well as emotions like fear.
  • determines approach and avoidance behavior.
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  • patients with damage to the VMPC, who have trouble processing emotional value as a result of that damage, would behave differently in those scenarios than normal individuals (and other brain-damaged patients
  • The standard interpretation of these results is that in the impersonal scenarios, people are making the moral decision using conscious reasoning. Specifically, they are thought to be using utilitarian ethical principles to make the decision to flip the switch and kill one person to save five. In the personal scenarios, however, people tend not to make utilitarian decisions, and researchers therefore believe that they are basing their decision on the emotional response the situation elicits.
  • damage to the VMPC can make decisions related to the value of a stimulus more difficult
  • there was a difference between the normal patients (and brain-damaged elsewhere patients) and the VMPC-damaged patients for the high-conflict personal moral scenarios. The normal and non-VMPC brain-damaged patients said "no" (they wouldn't smother the baby, e.g.) about 80% of the time in response to these scenarios, while the VMPC-damaged patients said no less than 60% of the time (in fact, their response rate was pretty close to 50-50).
  • more rational
  • they just didn't know how to respond to those scenarios
  • unable to decide
  • when people are making these decisions, both the emotional reaction and the moral principle are available at the same time, and one will win out over the other, depending largely on the strength of the emotional response (which is strong in the personal scenarios, and weak in the impersonal ones, at least when they're just being read on paper). This would be inconsistent with strong intuitionist theories of moral judgment.
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    Koenigs, M., Young, L., Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Cushman, F., Hauser, M., & Damasion, A. (2007). Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements. Nature.
Rudy Garns

Study Finds Brain Injury Changes Moral Judgment - New York Times - 0 views

  • native revulsion
  • ventromedial prefrontal cortex
  • active during moral decision-making
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  • a very specific kind of emotion-based judgment is altered when the region is offline
  • emotional system
  • utilitarian cost-benefit analyses
  • ventromedial area
  • ventromedial area
  • blind to subtle social cues, making them socially awkward
  • strongly rejected doing harm to others in situations that were not a matter of trading one certain death for another.
  • direct action to kill or harm someone
  • Those with ventromedial injuries were about twice as likely as the other participants to say they would push someone in front of the train
  • navigate social interactions
  • brain stem
  • amygdala
  • emotional memories,
  • social emotions that we can feel, like embarrassment, guilt, compassion that are critical to guiding our social behavior,
  • ension between cost-benefit calculations and instinctive emotion
  • ancient principle: respect for the life of another human being
    • Rudy Garns
       
      It would be interesting to see whether other primates use the ventromedial cortex for similar responses to dilemmas involving conspecifics.
  • increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others' lives
    • Rudy Garns
       
      I wonder what would happen if you adjust the identity of the sacrificable person. What happens if person is a stranger versus a family member? They do run the "smother your baby" dilemma. Does it make a difference if it is a stranger? What about alternative to the other five victims? What information is the VMPFC working with?
Rudy Garns

The Legal Brain: How Does the Brain Make Judgments about Crimes? - 0 views

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    In our legal system, judges and juries have to assign responsibility for crimes and decide on appropriate punishments. A new imaging study reveals which area of the brain plays a key role in these cognitive processes. (Scientific American)
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