Virtue ethics suggest that there are two ways of making
decisions, either by evaluating the pros and cons in a utilitarian
fashion or by following a right-or-wrong deontological approach. An
experiment by Gregory Berns and his team
indicates that being confronted with sacred values triggers a
response in certain parts of our brain without an evaluation of
rewards and consequences.
During the experiment explained below, the researchers recorded
brain activity while presenting participants with statements about
their values. Sacred values in particular led to the activation of
two brain areas that evaluate rights and wrongs (left
temporoparietal junction) and semantic rule retrieval (left
ventrolateral prefrontal cortex), while areas associated with
reward and utility were inactive.
Mislead public policy
Berns criticized that "most public policy is based on offering
people incentives and disincentives. Our findings indicate that
it's unreasonable to think that a policy based on
costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people's behavior when
it comes to their sacred personal values, because they are
processed in an entirely different brain system than
incentives."
"As culture changes, it affects our brains, and as our brains
change, that affects our culture. You can't separate the two,"
Berns stated. "We now have the means to start understanding this
relationship, and that's putting the relatively new field of
cultural neuroscience onto the global stage."
In a blog post, Andrew Watt from Melbourne University
reviewed the experiment conducted by Berns explaining how their
findings came about.
The experiment
"Sacred values are those fundamental values and beliefs which
guide the decisions you make throughout your life. From your
national identity to your political ideology, your religious
persuasion, and maybe even your sports team of choice these values
are defined by the fact that you wouldn't change them for all the
gold in the world. Or at least not for $100. And that's precisely
what participants in a recent study, investigating the neural
networks of all that is sacrosanct, were asked to do."
"Researchers at Emory University used fMRI to observe the brains
of 32 participants as they were shown statements ranging from the
mundane ("You are a cat person") to those that were thought to tap
into participant's sacred values ("You believe in god"). Each of
the 62 statements had an opposing pair ("You are a dog person" and
"You don't believe in god") and participants were told to select
the statements which best reflected their views."
"After they had made their selections the participants were
given the opportunity to auction off their personal statements for
an actual monetary reward, earning as much as $100 a statement
providing they would sign a document disavowing their previous
choices. Of course they were also given the option to not auction
off their beliefs at all if they were deemed too valuable to sell,
at least not for such a low value."
"If a person refused to take money to change a statement, then
we considered that value to be personally sacred to them. But if
they took money, then we considered that they had low integrity for
that statement and that it wasn't sacred." Gregory Berns
commented.
"When Berns and co compared the fMRI results with the statements
being viewed they found something very interesting. The statements
tapping into the participant's sacred values resulted in
significantly greater activation of the neural systems within the
left temporoparietal junction and the left ventrolateral prefrontal
cortex, and statements which the participants refused to oppose
resulted in activation of the amygdala."