Emotions Dictate Our Sense Of Morality It may seem intuitive to think that our sense of morality dictates our emotional response. That is, we know that hurting people is wrong, so when we see somebody hurt, it makes us angry or sad. Science, once again, is now suggesting that we have this completely backward: it’s not morality that dictates emotions, but our emotional response that shaped our morals.Basically, researchers found that when presented with an image of one person injuring another, two different areas of the brain lit up before the one associated with morality-based decisions. The first (known as the TPJ area—we’ll spare you the long version) immediately evaluates whether the act was intentional; the second, the amygdala, is associated with emotion. Only after the image was run through these filters (within about 250 milliseconds) did the “morality center” of the brain kick in.This helps to answer an age-old question in philosophy: do we believe that, say, striking somebody in anger is wrong because we are taught that it’s wrong? Or do we intuitively know that it’s wrong, from the emotional reaction that’s produced when we see it? It appears to be the latter, which we must say is a much more comforting view of human nature than the alternative.
Posted on: Sat, 17 May 2014 03:31:33 +0000
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