Thaindian News

Washington, March 31 (IANS) Neuroscientists can influence people’s moral judgments by disrupting a specific brain region — a finding that helps reveal how the brain constructs morality, says a new study.
To make moral judgments about other people, we often need to infer their intentions — an ability known as “theory of mind.”

For instance, if a hunter shoots his friend while on a hunting trip, we need to know what the hunter was thinking: Was he secretly jealous, or did he mistake his friend for a duck?

Previous studies have shown that a brain region known as the right temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), located at the brain’s surface above and behind the right ear, is highly active when we think about other people’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs.

In the new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study, the researchers disrupted activity in the right TPJ by inducing a current in the brain using a magnetic field applied to the scalp.

They found that the subjects’ ability to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions — for example, a failed murder attempt — was impaired.

The researchers were led by Rebecca Saxe, MIT assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences.

The study offers “striking evidence” that the right TPJ, is critical for making moral judgments, says Liane Young, lead author of the paper.

It is also startling, since under normal circumstances people are very confident and consistent in these kinds of moral judgments, says Young, postdoctoral associate in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

“You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour,” she says. “To be able to apply (a magnetic field) to a specific brain region and change people’s moral judgments is really astonishing.”

Young is now doing a study on the role of the right TPJ in judgments of people who are morally lucky or unlucky, says an MIT release.

For example, a drunk driver who hits and kills a pedestrian is unlucky, compared to an equally drunk driver who makes it home safely, but the unlucky homicidal driver tends to be judged more morally blameworthy.

These findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.