Two nights ago, I caught a fascinating
NOVA scienceNow report on a recent
study wherein researchers altered individuals'
moral judgments via the use of
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to a region of the
brain known to be associated with moral processing (right temporoparietal junction; RTPJ). Specifically, RTPJ has been shown to be active when evaluating the beliefs and intentions of an individual's actions. In two separate studies, participants were exposed to four possible scenarios involving the actions of an individual, subsequent to which they made a moral judgment about the permissibility of such an act.
Suppose that you are told that an individual were to pour sugar in the cup of a friend (while visiting a chemical plant). The sugar is stored in a mug labeled "toxic." The four delineated scenarios consist of what the individual thought the contents of the mug were (sugar or toxic powder) and what the actual reality was (sugar or toxic powder). Hence, we have:
(1) The individual thought that the powder was sugar and it was indeed sugar. The friend drinks the coffee and survives.
(2) The individual thought that the powder was sugar but it was a toxic powder. The friend drinks the coffee and dies.
(3) The individual thought that the powder was toxic but it was sugar. The friend drinks it and survives.
(4) The individual thought that the powder was toxic and it was indeed toxic. The friend drinks it and dies.
The key difference between the two studies is that in study 1 TMS was administered prior to the moral judgments being made (offline) whereas in study 2 it was administered during the moral judgments (online). The key dependent measure was how permissible the act of the individual was on a 1-7 scale (forbidden to permissible). The moral judgments of each of the four experimental groups were compared to a corresponding group that received TMS at a control site (i.e., not at the RTPJ).
In both studies, the same statistically significant was found, namely in condition 3 (harm was intended but the outcome was positive), participants who had received TMS in their RTPJ judged the action as more morally permissible as compared to their control counterparts. In other words, the application of TMS to the RTPJ disrupts individuals' abilities to accurately ascribe intentionality in judging the moral behaviors of another.
This paradigm strikes me as particularly promising in that it goes beyond the more "passive" neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI) that have slowly diffused into economics and marketing (neuroeconomics and neuromarketing). Specifically, rather than merely mapping differential neuronal activation patterns in various regions of the brain, TMS offers the opportunity for non-invasive experimental manipulations of the brain. I eagerly await the consumer-related findings that might arise via this paradigm (two of the leading consumer neuroscientists are Carolyn Yoon and Baba Shiv; see also Garcia & Saad, 2008 for a discussion of evolutionary neuromarketing).
Update: Shortly after I put up the post, my colleague William Tooke advised me that Rebecca Saxe (one of the coauthors of the study in question) gave a TED talk on this exact work. Speaking of TED, I am happy to announce that I'll be speaking at the upcoming TEDxConcordia event on February 19th. If you are in the Montreal region, try to make it!
Source for Image:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice//images/article_images/201003291609...
