Ethics Newsline®

“We are biologically programmed to be moral,” says scientist who used scanner to monitor brain activity

WASHINGTON
A new study shows that most people emphasize the concept of fairness when faced with an ethical dilemma.

ABC News reports that researchers from the California Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois showed that humans’ sense of ethics and fairness is deeply rooted in emotional processing.

The researchers based their results on brain scans of 26 people who played an electronic game in which they had to make tough choices about an orphanage facing a food shortage, Newsweek reports.

According to the journal Science, the basic scenario focused on a tough choice: Would you use a more efficient way of distributing food that would bring in more food overall but result in some children having less food than others, or would you choose a less-efficient mechanism that would result in less food being brought into the starvation zone while allowing it to be distributed equally?

The results: Fairness almost always trumps efficiency — as evidenced by brain scans showing more activity in the insula, the area of the brain associated with fairness, as opposed to the putamen, the region of the brain dealing with logic and reason, according to London’s Daily Telegraph.

Dr. Steven Quartz of Cal Tech told the Telegraph that there is “a good deal of evidence regarding the willingness of people to enforce fairness norms even when it comes at a cost to themselves.”

“We are biologically primed to be moral,” Quartz said.

Sources: ABC News, May 9 — Science, May 9 — Telegraph, May 9 — Newsweek, May 8.

For more information, see: Related Newsline story, Apr. 7 — Related Newsline story, Mar. 10 — Related Newsline story, Nov. 13, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Sep. 17, 2007 — Related Newsline story, Feb. 12, 2007 — Abstract of study, Science, May 9.