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Magnetism Can Sway Man's Moral Compass
Hugh Pickens writes "Discovery News reports that scientists have identified a region of the brain which appears to control morality and discovered that a powerful magnetic field can scramble the moral center of the brain, impairing volunteers' notion of right and wrong. 'You think of morality as being a really high-level behavior,' says Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. 'To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgments is really astonishing.' Young and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate an area of the brain just above and behind the right ear known as the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ), which other studies had previously related to moral judgments. Volunteers were exposed to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for 25 minutes before reading stories involving morally questionable characters, and being asked to judge their actions. The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm — not whether they were morally wrong in themselves. The scientists didn't permanently remove the subjects' moral sensibilities and on the scientists' seven point scale, the difference was about one point, averaging out to about a 15 percent change, 'but it's still striking to see such a change in such high level behavior as moral decision-making.' Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality, and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another."
How long until this is used as a defense in court?
Wow...all those years of double daring my data center colleagues to put the hand electric de-gausser to their forehead and turn it on for 30 seconds might have more of an effect than I anticipated.....
So it isn't just a bad cliche when in the movies the bad guys always run a car salvage/crushing yard with the big electromagnet cranes.
The researchers found that when the RTPJ was disrupted volunteers were more likely to judge actions solely on the basis of whether they caused harm — not whether they were morally wrong in themselves.
What distinction are they making between the two? There are philosophies that would hold the two ideas as identical.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
A one-point difference on a seven-point scale among only twenty volunteers? Doesn't smell very solid to me.
A lot of activities and mental states which do not harm people are considered morally wrong. For example, homosexuality, coveting and envy, pride, "thoughtcrime" in the novel, 1984, etc.
I see a future where they'll have strong electromagnets embedded in military helmets, to ease everyone through the more morally dubious adventures overseas. Of course, in order to invent the helmet, you'd have to be already morally compromised, which would require an existing helmet... Or just a psychopath.
Your Honor it was not my fault. The Earth's magnetic field in a fit of anomalous abnormally high activity a half-hour prior to the robbery compromised my frontal lobe's capacity to allow me to understand what I was going to do was wrong......
The difference between 'likely to cause harm' and 'did cause harm.' In one question, they asked if it was morally wrong to let your girlfriend walk across a bridge you knew was dangerous, even if she made it to the other side safely. Magnetized folks thought, 'well she made it across, it's morally okay' while other people were more likely to think it was wrong even if she was unharmed this particular time.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Beer must have an extremely strong magnetic field.... morality goes out the door whenever I consume a few too many.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
After months of grueling research bombarding test subjects with all manner of loud and annoying electromagnetic devices and being told to lie just right so that the readings aren't disrupted at all, the test subjects all said they wanted to kill all the researchers in a variety of gruesome ways and didn't have any moral conundrum with doing so. As there were no noticeable flaws in the experiment, the researchers concluded that magnetism can sway the moral compasses of human beings. Case closed!
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
canada is near the north pole, while the usa is closer to the south pole. the more south you go in the usa in fact, the more conservative the opinion
so clearly north pole=liberal, south pole=conservative
so i will now invent my colossal magnetic northern monopole, hide it in an office tower in dallas texas, and forever alter politics towards the forces of reason and morality! and screw up navigation compasses everywhere!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...it would certainly explain why there are so many rude cell phone users :-)
(insert witty/esoteric/dumb quote here)
What does this mean for someone like me, who lives life by my own idea of morality, which is "Do whatever you want as long as you bring no harm to another"?
Maybe they're interpreting "harm" differently.
How can magnets impact my moral choices? Isn't my soul supposed to do that? Is my soul a magnet? Maybe free will is magnetic. Or MAYBE, just maybe, those things don't exist except as concepts in the human mind.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Very useful feature that.
Deleted
You have a better chance of getting laid by the bimbos in Philosophy 101?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
From the MIT article: "they found that the subjects' ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people's intentions".
They don't appear to have claimed a general change to moral judgments of all types. They're saying that people were less able to make moral judgments that involved modeling someone else's internal state.
What it sounds like to me is, someone found humanity's Asperger switch.
So this is how you make a Helm of Opposite Alignment!
Lawful Evil, here I come!
A small change in moral response, and even then, it isn't as if they turned off the moral center. Looks like they just caused the subjects to focus on the effect of the action than the reasons behind it. It's almost like they muffled some of the higher reasoning functions behind morality and changed the focus from "The person's action resulted in [x], though he didn't mean it to" to "The person's action resulted in [x]".
They didn't kill morality; they hastened the response to a morally vague event. Black and white, no grey.
So they've invented an irrationality filter?
It doesn't say about the age of the volunteers but I'd wager they're all students with no real life experience, I'd like to see them try this with older people, that had their morals tested and tried over the years, all the students have is the theory of what is right and wrong, but with no life experience to reinforce it. Aside from that I'm curious how this affects cops, criminals or others that have their morals tested heavily over the years, without significantly changing their path.
i remember hearing about something one could drink that would achieve similar results ... with the added benefit of making everyone look better ...
How long until this is used as a defense in court?
At the very least, for the folks on the TV show "Lost" we could explain away their crazy behavior -- the magnetism is outrageous there and messed with their minds!
"THE SMOKE MONSTER TOLD ME TO DO IT AND IT JUST SEEMED *RIGHT*!"
Except Milgram showed that a few people are completely immune to coercion by authority. This equipment will probably work on anyone.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
What did they do to distinguish scrambling of moral judgement from simple scrambling of judgement? Seems to me that people who are simply having trouble thinking clearly are likely to make these mistakes. Someone whose ability to think at all is impaired might very well assert that the guy who let his girl walk across the unsafe bridge was blameless because they lost track of the fact that he knew it was unsafe.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Person A accidentally breaks five tea cups while cleaning. Person B purposefully breaks one tea cup.
Most people would say that B's actions were "more wrong" than A's.
People who had their RTPJ disrupted said that A was "more wrong" because of the extent of the damage.
Another example they gave was that people with their RTPJ disrupted would say that accidentally poisoning someone was worse than attempting to poison someone and failing.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
TMS works by using quickly-changing magnetic fields to induce electric fields and neural firing. After 25 minutes of this, the neurons in that region are thoroughly worn out and don't function right for a while (see research on "temporary lesions").
This isn't about magnetic fields in general, just about very strong, quickly-changing ones applied to this one spot for a long time. This is among the most sensational writeup I've ever seen, and it totally misrepresents the point.
Read the article from MIT, not the other sources. You'll notice a distinct difference. I hate to see good research get misrepresented.
The non-MIT articles makes grand claims that are NOWHERE in the real research. The "journalists" makes large claims about the existence of a "moral center" of the brain. The actual study and the MIT summary gives a much more restrained and accurate description. It shows that temporary disruption of TPJ interferes with the complete normal process which draws upon many areas of the brain.
Let's use a train analogy to get away from car analogies.
In order for a train to go from A to B, there must be intact railing the whole way. If we alter a section of the track and derail the train, it does NOT prove that the removed section is the train transportation center of the railroad track. It is essential, but it is only part of the process. The disruption of this area of the brain only shows that it is essential in the complete processing of moral judgement, not the center itself. I'm not talking down this research, only the journalistic representation of it.
Ahah! This conclusively links em fields to the phenomenon of em sensitivity lawsuits. The EM fields remove the "sensitives" moral compass and allows them to fake symptoms for financial gain through lawsuits without feeling guilty.
> Except Milgram showed that a few people are completely immune to coercion by
> authority.
Milgram used no coercion.
> This equipment will probably work on anyone.
But it won't make them follow your orders. "Here's a gun. I'll pay you $10,000 if you'll take it and kill that guy." "No, that would be wrong." "Put this helmet on." "Ok." "Now again, I'll pay you $10,000 if you'll kill that guy." "Naw. Too much trouble. I'll just kill you and take the money." BAM!
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I misread the headline as:
:)
Management Can Sway Man's Moral Compass
And thought... now how is that news?
Except that isn't the difference they are referring to.
They are referring to the following cases:
1. Driving recklessly outside a school at dismissal time, but not hitting anyone.
2. Driving recklessly outside a school at dismissal time, and hitting someone.
Most people (though not all...) would consider both cases morally equivalent. It's not the hitting someone that is the immoral action, it's the placing them in danger in the first place.
Yea, right, because not questioning people may cause a strong magnetic field around one's head... People are so fast to jump to conclusions based on correlation, why did the news report that it is just a correlation when there is no way* it can't imply causation? Looks like some uninformed journalist just read the wikipedia article on logic falacies.
* Except for a flawed study, but that possibility is always present, and not directly related to the measured correlation..
Rethinking email
... and your argument would be wrong (no offense). Imagine a friend who is about to be killed. You could kill the would be killer and save your friend or you could let the scenario unfold naturally. Either choice causes harm by either allowing the death of a friend or causing the death of the killer. Even solid consequentionalists like Mill argued that when given a choice between actions, the moral road is not merely to minimize suffering but also to maximize happiness. Given for any choice that an action is either moral or not moral (law of the excluded middle), if two possible actions both yield no suffering or harm, then the moral choice is the action that then maximized happiness.
Again, that's if you believe all that utilitarian garbage. What consequentionalist ethics does not address is the "accidental moral choice" where an unintended consequence makes an immorally intended act moral. Imagine that you see an enemy on the street and you go to puch him in the face. You miss and knock out a guy who has your enemy held up at gunpoint. In effect, you've saved your enemy's life even though the intent was to cause harm. Clearly, this cannot be a moral act. By example, one can understand that purely reviewing the consequences of an action cannot define that action moral or immoral.
"Young points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the RTJP, morality and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another."
What is it with Slashdotters' completely fucked-in-the-head understanding of correlation vs. causation? The article says exactly the opposite of this summary!
"Recent fMRI studies of moral judgment find fascinating correlations, but Young et al usher in a new era by moving beyond correlation to causation," says Sinnott-Armstrong, who was not involved in this research.
And that was completely obvious without even needing to see the article anyway. This is a designed experiment. Designed experiments establish causation. (See Weiss, Introductory Statistics 7E, p. 22, et. al.) Obviously a person's moral judgements aren't causing the magnet that you're switching on-and-off to work. For chrissake.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
There's a TED talk from last year on this subject from the lead researcher, Rebecca Saxe.
Knowledge Brings Fear
So... what you call "soul" is nothing but an emergent property of your brain?
Why? What makes you jump to the conclusion that because two things are connected, therefore one must be caused by the other - and specifically that you get to choose which one that is?
Connected does not mean "causal".
If the "soul" (if it exists) is connected to the brain, and the magnet interferes with this connection, why is it surprising that behaviour also changes?
Because, if the soul-mind connection can be interefered with, that negates the moral purpose of the soul as repository for merits and demerits caused by good and bad actions. If your bad actions can result from a bad connection, then the soul (and the self) should not accrue the demerits, bad karma, stains, evil, or whatever you want to call it. Because if they did, then I could go to hell for walking under a strong magnet.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Designed experiments *attempt* to establish causation. They don't necessarily do so, as they can (and often do) establish instead a causal link via a secondary system.
....prepares to be buried for daring to argue with the reductionists...
In this case, for example, the actual research article states that the researchers believe the magnetic fields disrupt the ability for the subject to properly evaluate the intentions of the story protagonist, thus altering the outcome of their moral evaluation. This is different from fundamentally changing the subject's underlying moral framework.
Thus, the current study does show a causal link, but only between magnetism and perception, not a causal link between magnetism and morality.
By the current logic, if I throw a brick at your face and you stopped walking, I could then argue that bricks thrown at faces cause legs to cease functioning...
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