Magnet Mayhem: Modifying Morality with Magnets?

Mar. 31, 2010— -- An electromagnetic jolt to your brain can temporarily impair your sense of morality.

No, this isn't a comic-book tale -- just the most recent research coming out of MIT's moral psychology lab.

In a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers found that subjects were less able to judge the morality of others' actions when activity in the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ) -- a region of the brain located above the right ear -- was disrupted by a strong magnetic field.

"This suggests that there are multiple systems for morality and that you can selectively target and impair one at a time," says Liane Young, the lead author of the study. "The hope for moral psychologists is to discover the physical processes that give rise to moral decision and deconstruct morality by looking into the brain."

In the study, researchers asked twenty participants to read dozens of short narratives and rate characters' actions on a scale of one to seven -- one being forbidden and seven being completely permissible. While the subjects read and decided, researchers disrupted the function of their RTPJs using a powerful magnet. As a control, researchers would present similar moral questions while disrupting a different part of the brain, not believed to be associated with moral decisions.

One story presented a situation in which two girls are visiting a chemical plant and one fixes the other's tea using powder from a jar marked "toxic." Despite the label, the powder turns out to in fact, be sugar.

Under normal circumstances, most participants would factor in the girl's knowledge of the danger when deciding whether she did anything wrong. However, when Young and colleagues disrupted RTPJ activity, a subject was more likely to judge that her actions were without fault -- as long as the other girl wasn't harmed in the end.

"It typically matters to us when people cause harm intentionally; typically intent is the dominant factor in our moral judgments. What we showed here is that we can interrupt intention processing so people go more with the outcomes," Young says.

Compared to the control group, those who had their RTPJs disrupted during decision making were about 15 percent more likely to make moral decisions based solely on how a make-believe scenario came out -- a sort of "no harm, no foul" approach to morality.