Joshua Greene

But eventually, people, including Damasio's group,

tested patients like that, and it was exactly as our results predicted.

That is, the patients with this kind of brain damage were much more likely to say that it's okay to push the guy off the footbridge.

And then people studied other types of patients.

So you have patients with damage to a part of the brain called the basolateral amygdala, which is involved in goal-directed planning.

And those people will never say that it's okay, or very, very rarely say that it's okay to push the guy off the

the footbridge.

And you see similar responses in patients who have damage to a part of the brain called the hippocampus, which is involved in kind of envisioning a scenario and deciding how to act on it based on the details of what's going on.

People found that different types of drugs you can give people, you give people an anti-anxiety drug and they become more okay with the utilitarian response.

And you give people a drug that it's a depression drug, but has a sort of reverse effect early on so that it actually heightens the emotional response.

And those people are more likely to say that it's wrong.

And we've done further studies that have sort of teased apart the different circuits.

So now we have a decent kind of understanding of the basic neural circuitry involved in the sort of yes response and the no response to cases like the footbridge case.

okay, well, then what is it exactly about the footbridge case?

And years ago, we did studies that suggested there were kind of two different things going on.

One is what you might call the pushing.

So personal force.

So if you ask people, is it okay to push somebody off the footbridge?

Like 30% of people will say yes.

And then you can do a version and say, is it okay to