Whenever the news reports on a
tragedy, there are often amazing reports of heroism that go along with
them. Following the tragic shooting of
Representative Gabrielle Giffords and others in a parking lot in Arizona in January,
2011, details emerged about ordinary people who helped subdue the shooter. After the massive earthquake in Japan in March,
2011, there were many stories and pictures of groups helping to pull victims
from buildings that had collapsed.
One reason why it is so incredible
to read these stories is that from the comfort of your own home, it is hard to
envision whether you would have the courage to help out in the same
circumstance. Yet, when you read interviews
with people in these situations, they just report that they did what they felt
was the right thing to do at the time.
Of course, one big difference
between being at the scene of an event and reading about it later is the amount
of time that you have to think about it.
When you witness a crime or experience and earthquake, the situation
unfolds quickly. You have to make a snap
judgment about whether to take action.
Reading about it later, you can think carefully about what you think is
the right thing to do.
Joshua Greene and his colleagues
suggest that when people are faced with moral dilemmas, there are two different
reasoning systems that influence your decisions about what to do. One is a fast-acting emotion-based system
that provides a gut-reaction about how to act.
In many cases that have a moral dimension, this system favors actions
that fit with your responsibilities in the moment. The other is a slower reasoning system that
allows you to take broader societal good into account.
Over the past several years,
research on moral reasoning has developed a number of problems that place these
two kinds of decisions in opposition.
For example, imagine you go on a cruise in the Caribbean. An engine on the boat explodes, and the ship
starts to sink. Only a few of the ship’s
lifeboats are operational, and people start to climb aboard them. The boat you are on is so full of people, it
is likely to sink, but if you push a few people off the lifeboat, then many
more will be saved. What would you do?
In this case, choosing to push some
people off the boat would save many at the expense of a few. However, pushing some people off the boat
means that you have deprived those people of their right to try to survive as
well.
A paper in the June, 2011 issue of
Cognition by Renata Suter and Ralph
Hertwig explored whether people would give different responses to dilemmas like
this depending on the amount of time they had to respond. In one study, people were told that they were
going to read about a number of dilemmas.
Some were told that they should go with their first reaction and respond
as quickly as possible. Others were told
to think about the dilemma for as long as they needed to and then make a
choice.
They found that people who could
take as much time as they needed tended to make the choice that would save the
most people at the expense of the few.
That is, they would choose to push someone off the boat in order to save
everyone else. In contrast, those who
chose quickly, elected not to push people off the boat, despite the risk to
everyone else.
These results support the idea
that we reason about dilemmas in very different ways depending on the time we
have to make the choice. In the moment,
we are driven by a variety of emotions.
At times, our choices in the moment seem humane (trying to save everyone
or risking life and limb during a tragedy).
Of course, those same emotions can cause us to lash out in anger at
someone or to give into temptation in other circumstances.
When we have the time to justify
our choices, we can reduce the influence of our emotions on the eventual
choice. Whether this reason-based system
leads to a good choice, though, depends a lot on the system of rules we adopt
for making choices. Given enough time,
we can probably talk ourselves into anything.
