The Massachusetts Institute of Technologies moral psychology lab has just finished a study that suggests that it is possible to temporarily impair a person’s moral sensibilities with an electromagnetic jolt to the brain. In the study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers determined that subjects were less capable of judging the morality of other people’s actions when activity in the right temporoparietal junction of the brain (REPJ) was disrupted by a strong magnetic field.
“This suggests that there are multiple systems for morality and that you can selectively target and impair one at a time,” says Liane Young, the lead author of the study. ”The hope for moral psychologists is to discover the physical processes that give rise to moral decision and deconstruct morality by looking into the brain.”
The study tested a subject’s ability to judge morality by having volunteers read narratives that involve scenarios like a girl who, in one version of the narrative, inadvertently kills a friend by mistakenly poisoning their tea and in another version attempts to knowingly poison their friend but fails. Normally, subjects would forgive the girl who accidentally hurt her friend and condemn the girl who tried to hurt her friend and failed. For people under the influence of the electromagnetic disruption, it proved the opposite. They judged solely on outcome, not on intention. It was perfectly fine for the girl to attempt to poison her friend because she failed.
“It typically matters to us when people cause harm intentionally; typically intent is the dominant factor in our moral judgments. What we showed here is that we can interrupt intention processing so people go more with the outcomes,” Young says.
The magnets that MIT is using for its brain disruption research aren’t normal magnets, so don’t worry about that Disneyland souvenir on your fridge turning your children into an evil genius overnight. The point of the study is not that magnets can make you immoral, according to Young, but that the RTPJ clearly has some control over our sense of morality. Young and her colleagues hope to use this knowledge to further our understanding of the brain and moral decision making.
Still sounds like one of the Joker’s evil plans to us.
