09 Greene, J. D., Sommerville, R. B., Nystrom, L. E., Darley, J. M., & Cohen, J. D.

(2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment.

Science, 293, 2105-2108.
2105
- Although both reason and emotion are likely to play important roles in moral judgment,
relatively little is known about their neural correlates, the nature of their interaction, and
the factors that modulate their respective behavioral influences in the context of moral
judgment
- fmri studies, moral dilemmas as probes
- moral dilemmas vary systematically in the extent to which they engage emotional
processing and that these variations in emotional engagement influence moral judgment
- refer to trolley and deacon pipap dilemmas
2106
- crucial difference between the trolley dilemma and the footbridge dilem- ma lies in the
latters tendency to engage peoples emotions in a way that the former does not.
- stick deacon pipap to grenade = more emotionally salient than push switch
- emotional re- sponse that accounts for peoples tendency to treat these cases
differently
Some moral dilemmas (those relevant- ly similar to the footbridge dilemma) engage
emotional processing to a greater extent than others (those relevantly similar to the
trolley dilemma), and these differences in emotional engagement affect peoples
judgments
- check neuroanatomical correlates
2107
- increased emotional engagement in moral-personal condition by revealing a re- action
time pattern that is unique to that condition and that was predicted by our hypothesis
concerning emotional interference
- increased emotional responses generated by the moral-personal dilemmas have an
influence on and are not merely incidental to moral judgment

This personal-impersonal distinc- tion has proven useful in generating the present

results, but it is by no means definitive.

- We view this distinction as a useful first cut, an important but preliminary step toward
identifying the psychologically essen- tial features of circumstances that engage (or fail
to engage) our emotions and that ulti- mately shape our moral judgmentsjudg- ments
concerning hypothetical examples such as the trolley and footbridge dilemmas but also
concerning the more complicated moral dilemmas we face in our public and private
lives.
- A distinction such as this may allow us to steer a middle course between the traditional
rationalism and more recent emo- tivism that have dominated moral psychology (26 ).
10 Bartels, D. M., & Pizarro, D. A. (2011). The mismeasure of morals: Antisocial
personality traits predict utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. Cognition, 121,
154-161.
154
- Participants who indicated greater endorsement of utilitarian solutions had higher
scores on measures of Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and life meaninglessness.
- variety of researchers have shown that individuals with higher working memory
capacity and those who are more deliberative thinkers are, indeed, more likely to
approve of utilitarian solutions (Bartels, 2008; Feltz & Cokely, 2008; Moore, Clark, &
Kane, 2008)
Bartels, D. M. (2008). Principled moral sentiment and the flexibility of moral judgment
and decision making. Cognition, 108, 381417.
- another possible psy- chological route to utilitarian preferencesthe ability to inhibit
emotional reactions to harm (or the inability to experience such emotions in the first
place).
- For instance, patients with damage to the ventromedial pre-frontal cor- tex, who have
emotional deficits similar to those observed in psychopaths (leading some researchers
to refer to this type of brain damage as acquired sociopathy; Saver & Damasio, 1991),
are more likely to endorse utilitarian solu- tions to sacrificial dilemmas (Koenigs et al.,
2007)

157
- the widely adopted use of sac- rificial dilemmas in the study of moral judgment fails to

distinguish between people who

- are motivated to endorse utilitarian moral choices because of underlying
emotional deficits (such as those captured by our measures of psy- chopathy and
Machiavellianism)
- and those who endorse it out of genuine concern for the welfare of others and a
considered belief that utilitarianism is the optimal way of achieving the goals of morality
Well, that sucks......
11 Cacioppo, J. T., Petty, R. E., & Kao, C. F. (1984). The efficient assessment of
need for cognition. Journal of Personality Assessment, 48(3), 306-307.
(NONE)
12
12 Olatunji, B. O., Cisler, J. M., Deacon, B. J., Connolly, K., & Lohr, J. M. (2007).
The Disgust Propensity and Sensitivity Scale-Revised: Psychometric properties
and specificity in relation to anxiety disorder symptoms. Journal of Anxiety
Disorders, 21, 918-930.
920
- The DPSS is a 32-item measure designed to assess the frequency of experiencing
disgust (propensity) as well as the emotional impact of those symptoms (sensitivity).
- election of items based on theory- and data-driven considerations resulted in a revised
DPSS (DPSS-R) that consisted of only 16 items.
927
- stuff assessed by the DPSS-R items are relatively far removed from the experience of
most nonclinical participants
- possible that the DPSS-R is not an optimal measure of disgust experiences in
nonclinical populations
14 Moore, A. B., Clark, B. A., & Kane, M. J. (2008). Who shalt not kill? Individual
differences in working memory capacity, executive control, and moral judgment.
Psychological Science, 19(6), 549-557.

549
- People with higher WMC found certain types of killing more appropriate than did those
with lower WMC and were more consistent in their judgments.
- We also report interactions between manipulated variables that implicate complex
emotion-cognition integration processes not captured by current dual-process views of
moral judgment.
Pontius Pilate then went and did his pilates.
In personal dilemmas, subjects contemplated
(a) causing serious bodily harm or death to
(b) another person or persons,
(c) in a way that did not simply deflect preexisting harm onto another person; personal
dilemmas thus involved up close and personal harmful acts the subjects directly
initiated. Impersonal dilemmas did not meet these three criteria.

550
- Greene et al. thus proposed a dual- process model:
- Personal moral dilemmas evoke an automatic, hot emotional response that
biases against responding in a way that causes harm
- but this response may be overridden by cold cognitive control.
AIM OF STUDY = we tested this dual-process theory by asking whether individual
differences in control, indexed by scores on working-memory-capacity (WMC) tasks,
would predict cold, consequentialist responses to personal dilemmas
- we hypothesized that by controlling emotion and engaging deliberative processing,
people with greater WMC would more rationally evaluate consequences within personal
moral dilemmas
All critical dilemmas involved killing one individual to save more people, but the killing
contemplated in personal dilemmas was more physically direct than the killing
contemplated in impersonal dilemmas
556
- our findings do not support the idea that executive control must override prepotent
emotional processes if people are to endorse provocative resolutions to moral dilemmas