Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

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Kanastrous
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Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

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Magnets can alter a person's sense of morality, according to a new report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a powerful magnetic field, scientists from MIT, Harvard University and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are able to scramble the moral center of the brain, making it more difficult for people to separate innocent intentions from harmful outcomes. The research could have big implications for not only neuroscientists, but also for judges and juries.

"It's one thing to 'know' that we'll find morality in the brain," said Liane Young, a scientist at MIT and co-author of the article. "It's another to 'knock out' that brain area and change people's moral judgments."

Before the scientists could alter the brain's moral center, they first had to find it.

Young and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging to locate an area of the brain known as the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ), which other studies had previously related to moral judgments. While muscle movement, language and even memory are found in the same place in each individual, the RTPJ, located behind and above the ear, resides in a slightly different location in each person.

For their experiment, the scientists had 20 subjects read several dozen different stories about people with good or bad intentions that resulted in a variety of outcomes.

One typical story was about a boyfriend who leads his girlfriend across a bridge. In some versions, the boyfriend harmlessly walked his girlfriend across the bridge with no ill effect. In other cases, the boyfriend intentionally led the girlfriend along so she would break her ankle. The subjects used a seven point scale — one being forbidden and seven completely permissible — to record whether they through the situation was morally acceptable or not.

While the subjects read the story, the scientists applied a magnetic field using a method known as transcranial magnetic stimulation. The magnetic fields created confusion in the neurons that make up the RTPJ, said Young, causing them to fire off electrical pulses chaotically.

The confusion in the brain made it harder for subjects to interpret the boyfriend's intent, said Young, and instead made the subjects focus solely on the situation's outcome. The effect was temporary and safe.

When no magnetic field was applied, the subjects focused more on the boyfriend's good intentions, rather than a bad outcome. When a magnetic field was applied to the RTPJ, the subjects consistently focused on a bad outcome, rather than the intention, and rated the story as more morally objectionable.

The scientists didn't permanently remove the subjects moral sensibilities. On the scientists' seven point scale, the difference was about one point and averaged out to about a 15 percent change. It's not much, said Young, "but it's still striking to see such a change in such high level behavior as moral decision-making." Young also points out that the study was correlation; their work only links the the RTJP, morality and magnetic fields, but doesn't definitively prove that one causes another.

The research could have powerful implications not just for neuroscientists, but for lawyers as well. Every day jurors are asked to weigh a person's actions against their intentions. This new study won't transform the legal field, said Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt University, but it could "enable sophisticated judgments about responsibility, harm and appropriate punishment."

"This study, and other recent studies like it, are enabling us to peer into the very brain activity that underlies and enables legal judgments," said Jones. "Understanding how legal decisions actually work is a potentially important step toward helping decisions be as fair, just and effective as they can be."

What the new research won't do is allow a jury, or even an individual, to be unwittingly manipulated to favor prosecutors or defendants. Because it was so obvious that the magnets were turned on, it is unlikely that a person or a group, like a jury, could be swayed to consider a criminal outcome instead of intent, said Young.

Magnetic fields made people judge outcomes more than intentions. Whether it's possible to do the opposite — making people focus more on intentions than outcomes — Young doesn't know.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/36089873/ns ... -behavior/

I'm curious as to how people with some background in neuroscience interpret this (to the degree that a lay article from the mainstream press offers anything to interpret).
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Covenant
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Re: Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

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I am terribly confused. When they used the Morality Magnet on someone, it made them take more offense to a boyfriend deliberately breaking the ankle of his girlfriend than when it was not magnetized?
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Re: Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

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They rated how moral someone's actions were from 1 to 7 after being told a story.

The problem here is that the sample size sounds pants small to me. 20 subjects? Does that mean total, 10 for the field and 10 control? Or 20 field and 20 control?
In such a really subjective scale, I would imagine 20 different people's averaged scores can just vary because of the subjectivity of the scoring system.
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Re: Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

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Seems like when the Morality Magnet is off, the test subjects evaluated actions based upon both intent *and* consequences. When the Morality Magnet is on, the test subjects tended to evaluate the described actions based upon its consequences, but *not* the intent behind them.
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Admiral Valdemar
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Re: Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

Post by Admiral Valdemar »

Although I've not seen this done with "morality magnets" before, the idea that the mind can be affected by strong magnetic fields has been around donkeys years. Some would even speculate you could directly tap into a person's thought processes with a decent enough contraption along the lines of a far more advanced fMRI.
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Re: Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

Post by Kanastrous »

Yeah, I've read about studies where sensations correlating to reports of UFO abduction, angelic visitation, presence of 'others' etc have been reported by test subjects under strong EM fields.

Maybe future study will demonstrate that you can create both the presence-of-God *and* the God-telling-you-what's-moral experiences with the right kind of EMF effects.
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CyrilsScribe
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Re: Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

Post by CyrilsScribe »

You can also affect trust with Oxytocin, a neurotransmitter, subjects given large doses would trust people impulsively, great for someone manipulating a ponzi scheme or trust game

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 03701.html
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Re: Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

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>nevermind<
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Alyrium Denryle
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Re: Study: Magnetic Fields Can Affect Moral Judgment

Post by Alyrium Denryle »

Nephtys wrote:They rated how moral someone's actions were from 1 to 7 after being told a story.

The problem here is that the sample size sounds pants small to me. 20 subjects? Does that mean total, 10 for the field and 10 control? Or 20 field and 20 control?
In such a really subjective scale, I would imagine 20 different people's averaged scores can just vary because of the subjectivity of the scoring system.
It does not matter. If the effect size is large enough, a low sample size will still be statistically significant.
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