A fascinating aspect of humanity is that we hold ourselves
to a high moral standard. We impose
rules on ourselves to protect society from the short-term temptations that
might cause us to do things that would have a negative impact in the
long-run. For example, we might be
tempted to harm a person who bothers us, but a society in which everyone gave
in to the temptation to hurt those who made us angry would quickly devolve into
chaos.
When we make these moral
judgments, to what extent are people driven by their ability to reason about
the consequences of their actions, or are they influenced by their
emotions? For the past 25 years,
researchers have become increasingly interested in the role that emotions play
in complex judgments like moral decisions.
For example, Antonio Damasio reviews evidence for the role of emotion in
cognitive processing in his book Descartes’ Error.
Once we accept that emotion plays
some role in complex decisions, it is important to figure out which emotions
are influencing different kinds of choices.
This issue was explored in an interesting paper by Adam Perkins and several
colleagues in the August, 2013 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
These researchers were interested
in moral decision making. In particular,
many psychologists have looked at how participants respond in vignettes in
which their actions could potentially cause harm to others. Quite a bit of research demonstrates that
people don’t like to cause harm to others, but that they are particularly
averse to causing harm when they have to perform an action that causes direct
harm to a person.
For example, imagine a situation
in which you are working in a hospital as a late-night guard. An accident
happens next door, and deadly fumes are released that get into the hospital’s
ventilation system. These fumes will kill
three patients, but if you flip a switch, you can redirect the fumes to another
area of the hospital that will kill only one patient. In cases like this, although there is clearly
a dilemma, people often elect to flip the switch.
As a second example, imagine that
you are taking a cruise, when the ship catches fire and you have to get on a
lifeboat. All of the lifeboats have too
many people on them, and are in danger of sinking. In your boat, there is an injured person who
is going to die before you are rescued. If you throw that person overboard, the
boat will not sink and everyone else will be saved. In this situation, people are reluctant to
throw the person overboard, because this action would directly cause the death
of the person.
The researchers suggest that the
emotion of anxiety is a key factor that keeps people from stating that they
would be willing to cause someone’s death directly in these vignettes. To test this possibility, participants were
given vignettes like these as well as control stories in which people had to
make decisions with no moral dimension like which of two raffle tickets to buy
based on the prize available.
To test the role of anxiety in
these decisions, 40 participants were run in three sessions. In two of those sessions, participants were
given a low or a moderate dose of the anti-anxiety drug lorazepam. In the other session, participants received a
placebo.
The drug had no reliable effect on
people’s decisions for choices that had no moral element or for people’s
choices when their actions would cause a person’s death indirectly. However, participants were most likely to
elect to directly cause a person’s death in these dilemmas on the highest dose
of lorazepam, least likely to cause the death in the placebo condition with the
low dose condition in-between.
These results have to be taken
with some caution. The effects are
rather small. Participants made
decisions in six decisions of each type in each session. In the placebo condition, participants chose
to kill a person directly in 1.75 of these dilemmas on average. That rate rose to 2.33 dilemmas on average
for the highest dose of the drug. So,
the drug did have a reliable influence on performance, but not a huge
influence.
In addition, these studies involve
only vignettes. It is hard to know
exactly how people’s responses to stories relate to what they would actually do
in a real situation.
However, the study does help to isolate the
set of emotions that influence moral decisions.
Anti-anxiety drugs like lorazepam influence anxiety and people’s
response to threat. They do not have a
broad-based effect on emotion overall. So,
this research does push forward our understanding of the role of emotion in
complex decisions.
