People make decisions every day. Most decisions are made without really thinking. But what happens to the brain when it is confronted with decisions that are not made on a day to day basis, or decisions that test morals? Joshua D. Greene, along with his colleagues, asked this very question and I was extremely intrigued by their findings.
Greene asked three types of questions: moral personal, moral impersonal and non moral. An example of moral personal was “You are standing next to a large stranger on a footbridge that spans the tracks, in between the oncoming trolley and five people. In this scenario, the only way to save the five people is to push this stranger off the bridge, onto the tracks below. He will die if you do this, but his body will stop the trolley from reaching the others. Ought you to save the five others by pushing this stranger to his death?” Greene then posed a similar question he referred to as moral impersonal: “A runaway trolley is headed for five people who will be killed if it proceeds on its present course. The only way to save them is to hit a switch that will turn the trolley onto an alternate set of tracks where it will kill one person instead of five. Ought you to turn the trolley in order to save five people at the expense of one?” Third he asked a non-moral question like “should you take the bus or train given certain time restraints?”
In the study, Greene performed two experiments. The experiments dealt with brain activity in the areas associated with emotion, and the areas associated with memory. In both experiments, the brain changes when given a moral-personal situation were significantly different in every section of the brain than when given a moral impersonal, or non-moral question. Besides the medial frontal gyrus and posterior cingulated gyrus, the brain behaved quite similar in moral impersonal and non-moral questions.
It is interesting that even though both decisions involve deciding whether one person should live or five people should live, people struggle with making the decision about the footbridge. According to the study, most people have no problem flipping the switch to save five from the trolley, but when it comes to actually pushing a person, most people will not do it, even though it would save five. I myself would have a much more difficult time pushing someone to their death in order to save five people, than just flipping a switch and being completely disconnected from the individual who would ultimately die. By actually pushing someone, it would become more personal and seem more like murder, even though by not pushing the individual five others would die. The emotional connection outways what would seem like a simple decision; save one or five?