a*o
发帖数: 25262 | 1 CNN 刚发表这文章， very interesting..中文没找到。
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/26/health/brain-moral-judgments/inde
How your brain makes moral judgments
By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
This image shows differences in brain activity between people who judge an
act wrong and others who say it's not wrong.
(CNN) -- Imagine a CEO wants to profit from a venture that, by the way,
involves emitting pollution toxic to the environment, but she doesn't care
because the goal is profit.
Is the CEO intentionally harming the environment? What if, instead, the CEO
is pushing a project that happens to help the environment -- is the benefit
any more or less intentional than the harm in the other scenario? How do you
morally judge each of these situations?
Science is still trying to work out how exactly we reason through moral
problems such as these, and how we judge others on the morality of their
actions, said Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, professor of practical ethics at
Duke University.
Researchers interested in the neuroscience of morality are investigating
which brain networks are involved in such decisions, and what might account
for people's individual differences in judgments. Studies on the topic often
involve small samples of people -- functional magnetic resonance imaging is
time-intensive and expensive -- but patterns are emerging as more results
come in.
"It's a field that's waiting for a big revolution sometime soon," Sinnott-
Armstrong said.
A moral network?
Scientists have shown that there is a specific network of brain regions
involved in mediating moral judgment. An influential study on this topic was
published in 2001 and led by Joshua D. Greene, associate professor at
Harvard University, author of "Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap
Between Us and Them."
Adrian Raine and Yaling Yang, in a 2006 review article, described this study
as a breakthrough. It focused "on the specific difference between making
judgments (i.e. 'appropriate' or 'inappropriate') on 'moral personal'
dilemmas (e.g. throwing a person out of a sinking life-boat to save others),
and 'moral impersonal' dilemmas (e.g. keeping money found in a lost wallet)
," they wrote.
Greene's study suggested that three brain structures -- the medial
prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate and angular gyrus on the left and
right sides -- "play a central role in the emotional processes that
influence personal moral decision-making," Raine and Yang wrote.
Opinion: Unlocking crime using biological keys
Other studies have since confirmed that these areas are important in
processing information about moral decisions, as well as an area called the
ventral prefrontal cortex.
Several researchers have additionally suggested that the brain areas
involved in moral judgment overlap with what is called the "default mode
network," which is involved in our "baseline" state of being awake but at
rest. The network is also active during "internally focused tasks including
autobiographical memory retrieval, envisioning the future, and conceiving
the perspectives of others," Randy Buckner and colleagues wrote in a 2008
study.
To further understand which brain networks are essential for moral judgment,
scientists study people whose behavior suggests that their relevant neural
circuitry may be damaged.
What goes wrong in psychopaths
Psychopaths, particularly those who are also convicted criminals, have been
the subject of much interest among scientists exploring moral judgment.
"They're not scared of punishment, they don't feel empathy towards other
people, they don't respect authorities that told them not to do things, and
so there's nothing stopping them from doing what other people would dismiss
in a nanosecond," Sinnott-Armstrong said.
Raine and Yang suggest, based on research, that "antisocial groups" such as
psychopaths may know what is moral, but they may lack a feeling of what is
moral.
A moral "feeling," which seems to be related to the brain's prefrontal
cortex and amygdala, is what takes the recognition that an act is immoral
and translates that recognition into behavioral inhibition, Raine and Yang
wrote. "It is this engine that functions less well in antisocial, violent
and psychopathic individuals."
Jesus Pujol of the Hospital de Mar, Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues did a
study published in 2012 to analyze how psychopaths' brain responses to moral
dilemmas might contrast with that of non-psychopaths.
Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging on 22 criminal
psychopathic men and 22 healthy men who were not offenders. They found that
most participants gave similar responses to moral dilemmas used in the study
, whether they were psychopathic or not.
But their brains told a different story: The psychopaths tended to show less
activation in the medial frontal and posterior cingulate cortices in
response to moral dilemmas. Researchers also found differences in the
psychopaths' brains in an analysis of functional connectivity -- that is,
they found impairment in the connections between some brain regions involved
in morality and other areas.
Pujol's group's more recent study, published this month in the journal
Biological Psychiatry, also found weakened connections in psychopaths'
brains that may affect their moral reasoning. Specifically, they found that
structures associated with emotion showed reduced connectivity to prefrontal
areas, and enhanced connectivity in an area associated with cognition.
The results suggest that, in criminal psychopaths, the brain does not
adequately use emotional information to control behavioral responses.
Good intentions, bad outcome?
Autism is another neurological condition that is being explored with regard
to moral judgment.
Rebecca Saxe at Massachusetts Institute of Technology has collaborated in
research looking at how people with autism may weigh intentions and outcomes
differently.
Saxe was the co-author on a 2011 study showing that autism may be related to
a different way of thinking about accidental harms. An example of this kind
of scenario would be: If a person tries to kill someone else, but doesn't
succeed, how do you judge them?
A typical cognitively healthy person tends to judge targeted efforts at
harming people as more morally wrong than accidental harms.
"What determines moral blame is not how bad the outcome is, but mostly what
was going on in the minds of the actors," she said at the American
Association of the Advancement of Science annual meeting last year.
Researchers compared people with high-functioning autism to those who do not
have the condition on a variety of scenarios.
Study authors found that people with autism did not consistently say that
accidental harms and attempted harms are morally different, appearing to
more heavily weight the negative outcome and less on the intention in making
the judgment. Typically developing 4-year-old children also show this
pattern, other research has found.
On average, individuals with autism tended to place less importance on
intention and beliefs, the study said, which could translate into
difficulties in everyday social situations.
There was also some variation in judgments among people without autism, Saxe
said.
Studies generally show that almost everyone puts some emphasis on both the
consequences and the intentions of the person who brought them on, Sinnott-
Armstrong said.
But given that different people make different moral judgments, the question
becomes, he said, "Whose moral judgments are affected by which factors in
which circumstances?"
Manipulation of judgment
Scientists have also shown that it's possible to manipulate moral judgment
by directly intervening in brain processes. Saxe was the senior author on a
2010 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on
this topic.
The study, involving with eight people in the first part and 12 in the
second, looked at a brain area called the right temporoparietal junction.
Researchers used a noninvasive technique called transcranial magnetic
stimulation (TMS) to disrupt the activity of neurons in this brain region.
TMS involves applying a magnetic field to a small area of the head, creating
weak electric currents that hamper brain cells' normal firing. It produces
a temporary effect.
Researchers applied TMS in two experiments. First, before participants made
a moral judgment, they received 25 minutes of TMS. In the second, they
experienced TMS in 500-millisecond bursts while making a moral judgment.
Then they compared these judgments to those participants made while
receiving TMS to a different brain region, as well as to the responses of
people who did not receive TMS.
Study authors found that TMS to the right temporoparietal junction was
associated with distinct response patterns. It appears that TMS to this
brain region biased judgments, compared to people who received TMS in a
different brain region, or no TMS at all.
Specifically, participants who received TMS in this area were more likely to
say that a person's attempts to inflict harm -- for instant, a failed
murder attempt -- were more morally permissible and less forbidden.
But don't worry, Saxe said -- TMS couldn't be used secretly for nefarious
purposes. Its effect lasted about 10 minutes; ideology and persuasion would
be more powerful and sneaky for changing someone's mind.
"TMS is not subtle," she said. "You can't be TMSed without knowing it. It's
a huge heavy loud machine and its effects are small."
But wait -- could TMS be used for good, to help people whose neural networks
are not functioning well in making rational moral judgments?
Sinnott-Armstrong thinks one day there could be treatments directly
developed for the brain in extreme cases, such as criminal psychopaths.
"It's possible that if we understand the neural circuits that underlie
psychopaths and their behavior, we can use medications and magnetic
stimulation to change their behavior," he said.
Such techniques might not work as well as behavioral training programs,
however, he said.
More unanswered questions
Existing studies tend to only look at how the brain responds to one kind of
moral question: Circumstances in which a hypothetical person in some way
causes harm, Sinnott-Armstrong said.
But there are many other areas to explore, such as disloyalty to friends, "
impure" sexual acts, and procedural injustice. How does the brain respond to
a good outcome achieved by questionable means, such as a good leader coming
to power in an unjust process? These topics are all ripe for future study.
"I think we have strong evidence that different brain systems are involved
in different kinds of moral judgments," he said.
And what about cross-cultural differences? How about judging people in your
national, cultural or political group vs. outsiders? Those could be other
areas of exploration, Saxe said.
Saxe is specifically planning to look at how people in particular groups
perceive the thoughts and perspectives of "enemies."
"Thinking about how these kinds of moral and psychological processes plug
into intergroup dynamics and exacerbate intergroup conflict, and also how
you could use them to defuse intergroup conflict, is one of the directions
we're going in the lab," she said. | s**t
发帖数: 17016 | 2 很有意思
【在 a*o 的大作中提到】
: CNN 刚发表这文章， very interesting..中文没找到。
: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/26/health/brain-moral-judgments/inde
: How your brain makes moral judgments
: By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
: This image shows differences in brain activity between people who judge an
: act wrong and others who say it's not wrong.
: (CNN) -- Imagine a CEO wants to profit from a venture that, by the way,
: involves emitting pollution toxic to the environment, but she doesn't care
: because the goal is profit.
: Is the CEO intentionally harming the environment? What if, instead, the CEO
| wh
发帖数: 141625 | 3 把最后那个看成了熊熊燃烧的蜡烛……
【在 a*o 的大作中提到】
: CNN 刚发表这文章， very interesting..中文没找到。
: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/26/health/brain-moral-judgments/inde
: How your brain makes moral judgments
: By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
: This image shows differences in brain activity between people who judge an
: act wrong and others who say it's not wrong.
: (CNN) -- Imagine a CEO wants to profit from a venture that, by the way,
: involves emitting pollution toxic to the environment, but she doesn't care
: because the goal is profit.
: Is the CEO intentionally harming the environment? What if, instead, the CEO
| a*o
发帖数: 25262 | 4 haha..
【在 wh 的大作中提到】
: 把最后那个看成了熊熊燃烧的蜡烛……
| P*g
发帖数: 599 | 5 哦。。。还真是大脑在做道德标准呢。。。
【在 a*o 的大作中提到】
: CNN 刚发表这文章， very interesting..中文没找到。
: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/26/health/brain-moral-judgments/inde
: How your brain makes moral judgments
: By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
: This image shows differences in brain activity between people who judge an
: act wrong and others who say it's not wrong.
: (CNN) -- Imagine a CEO wants to profit from a venture that, by the way,
: involves emitting pollution toxic to the environment, but she doesn't care
: because the goal is profit.
: Is the CEO intentionally harming the environment? What if, instead, the CEO
| T*****n
发帖数: 2456 | 6 民科读后感：
感觉这种研究很行为艺术啊。道德是进化的，一定社会条件下约定俗成的法则，然后个
人受到教育硬性接受的。在社会硬性规定的背景下，如何判断道德，更是一个心理学的
问题。非得和实证测量挂上钩，感觉是在骗funding啊，哈哈。看到开头那张图，我记
得看毛片的脑image，也是很类似的啊。对这种还原论研究我持有保留意见。
对psychopaths, particularly those who are also convicted criminals，还有自闭
症做个研究，然后就说要对文化差异下的道德冲突做实证【还原论】研究，这是准备闹
哪出？
【在 a*o 的大作中提到】
: CNN 刚发表这文章， very interesting..中文没找到。
: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/26/health/brain-moral-judgments/inde
: How your brain makes moral judgments
: By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
: This image shows differences in brain activity between people who judge an
: act wrong and others who say it's not wrong.
: (CNN) -- Imagine a CEO wants to profit from a venture that, by the way,
: involves emitting pollution toxic to the environment, but she doesn't care
: because the goal is profit.
: Is the CEO intentionally harming the environment? What if, instead, the CEO
| d*******d
发帖数: 3382 | 7 看这种开头没总结的文章总是很着急。。。
【在 a*o 的大作中提到】
: CNN 刚发表这文章， very interesting..中文没找到。
: http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/26/health/brain-moral-judgments/inde
: How your brain makes moral judgments
: By Elizabeth Landau, CNN
: This image shows differences in brain activity between people who judge an
: act wrong and others who say it's not wrong.
: (CNN) -- Imagine a CEO wants to profit from a venture that, by the way,
: involves emitting pollution toxic to the environment, but she doesn't care
: because the goal is profit.
: Is the CEO intentionally harming the environment? What if, instead, the CEO
| t*****e
发帖数: 15794 | 8 还是很有意思的。
通过仪器检测，
证明道德感和大脑中前部某区域活动有关，
罪犯和自闭症患者的数据发现，道德感可以量化
最后。人为的电磁干扰可以改变道德感判断结果。
A break through！
【在 d*******d 的大作中提到】
: 看这种开头没总结的文章总是很着急。。。
| a****8
发帖数: 365 | | l**a
发帖数: 5175 | 10
That is always the argument.
Where does moral come from? Plato discussed a question in Republic, can
virtues be taught?
The answer is no, virtue is not knowledge, so it can not be taught.
If Plato knows better than all of us.....he should know....
Scientific research can not prove many things.... But, that does not mean
something do not exist.
That is the most important argument.
It is in dialogues, not in republic, in meno.
【在 T*****n 的大作中提到】
: 民科读后感：
: 感觉这种研究很行为艺术啊。道德是进化的，一定社会条件下约定俗成的法则，然后个
: 人受到教育硬性接受的。在社会硬性规定的背景下，如何判断道德，更是一个心理学的
: 问题。非得和实证测量挂上钩，感觉是在骗funding啊，哈哈。看到开头那张图，我记
: 得看毛片的脑image，也是很类似的啊。对这种还原论研究我持有保留意见。
: 对psychopaths, particularly those who are also convicted criminals，还有自闭
: 症做个研究，然后就说要对文化差异下的道德冲突做实证【还原论】研究，这是准备闹
: 哪出？
| l**a
发帖数: 5175 | 11
Science can only raise questions, not answering them.
【在 d*******d 的大作中提到】
: 看这种开头没总结的文章总是很着急。。。
| l**a
发帖数: 5175 | 12
Give us some hope, still a long way to go.
The good thing is, these kinds of exp can help us understand more ..of human
activity.
【在 t*****e 的大作中提到】
: 还是很有意思的。
: 通过仪器检测，
: 证明道德感和大脑中前部某区域活动有关，
: 罪犯和自闭症患者的数据发现，道德感可以量化
: 最后。人为的电磁干扰可以改变道德感判断结果。
: A break through！
| a*o
发帖数: 25262 | 13 这种艺术还是不错，把脑子里对人文教条的反应进一步用脑电图解释。很多人看毛片的
时候估计除了兴奋外，还非常感到不道德，不想被人知道，所以也有了这种反应。
为什么有些人能在很短时间内能做出非常坚定有力的决定，而有些人总是没有意志力，
遇到什么事情都要问一番，要大家的观点才下决定？人做每件事都有目的，而这个目的
后面有动力，动力需要决心，当你犹豫不决和快刀砍乱麻那一刻，脑子里有什么变化，
估计这应该这些关联挺大的。
也可以说是骗 funding， 可是起码做出点东西出来。。
很多领域的，包括经济学的都是或多或少都是心理学有关。为什么很多出色的艺术家都
或多或少都有些精神病？
【在 T*****n 的大作中提到】
: 民科读后感：
: 感觉这种研究很行为艺术啊。道德是进化的，一定社会条件下约定俗成的法则，然后个
: 人受到教育硬性接受的。在社会硬性规定的背景下，如何判断道德，更是一个心理学的
: 问题。非得和实证测量挂上钩，感觉是在骗funding啊，哈哈。看到开头那张图，我记
: 得看毛片的脑image，也是很类似的啊。对这种还原论研究我持有保留意见。
: 对psychopaths, particularly those who are also convicted criminals，还有自闭
: 症做个研究，然后就说要对文化差异下的道德冲突做实证【还原论】研究，这是准备闹
: 哪出？
|
|
