Liane Young
speaker
78 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Liane Young’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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We've looked at prison inmates with a clinical diagnosis of psychopathy, and we've looked at high functioning adults with autism. And so we've seen sort of a range of behavioral patterns across different populations of people in terms of how they use and how they deploy theory of mind capacities for moral judgments in particular.
I mean, we've all been in a situation where a joke falls flat because the person who's telling the joke... isn't able to appropriately assess the mood in this space or what other people know or don't know and so on. And so certainly there are many cases of that.
And then there are sort of the opposite cases where we really admire individuals for having a keen sense of what other people are thinking and feeling and able to shape a conversation or discussion in that way.
Yeah, you're right. And so it can be very complicated trying to figure out how theory of mind plays out in any given situation. You know, in my lab, when I'm particularly on Zoom, it can be a lot harder to read the room, if you will, figure out, you know, as a group, how people are doing and how to shape that space.
Yes, absolutely. So we usually have our subjects read stories that we write about other people who are performing actions that have effects on other people in the scenario. So in one story, we have a person named Grace who put some powder into a co-worker's coffee. And in one scenario, she thinks the powder is sugar. but the powder turns out to be poison and she ends up poisoning her friend.
So that's a version of the scenario in which someone causes harm to someone else by accident because of a false belief. In another version of the story, Grace puts powder into her co-worker's coffee. She thinks the powder is poison, but it turns out to be sugar. So that's a situation in which She has a harmful intention, but no harm is done.
So in these two cases, there is a conflict between the intention of the agent and the outcome of the agent's action. And so we can ask our volunteer participants, for their moral judgments of both the person, the agent performing the action, and also the action itself, whether this action is morally permissible or morally forbidden.
And using these kinds of scenarios and these kinds of moral judgment scales, we can get a sense for the extent to which different people rely on information about intentions to make their moral judgments. So you and I, for instance, could have very different views about how bad it is to accidentally poison a coworker.
And sort of depending on the circumstances, there could be a situation in which there's just no way she could have known maybe somebody swapped the sugar and the poison and she had the best of intentions. And so those are cases where there's a lot of flexibility for individual variation in moral judgments. And we can apply that same reasoning to the case of a failed attempt to cause harm too.
Some people might focus more on the neutral outcome, the fact that nothing bad happened at all, whereas other folks might focus a lot more on the fact that this person just tried to poison their coworker and that's very, very bad.
So we've run a number of studies now using brain imaging techniques to look at how people's brains are responding as they're making moral judgments of these kinds of cases. And so what we found in one study was that a brain region called the right temporal parietal junction, which is right above and behind your right ear, processes information about people's intentions.
And what we found was that the more an individual's right temper pridal junction responds as they are making these moral judgments, the more they are using information about innocent intentions to let the person who caused harm by accident off the hook.
And so we see this correlation between brain activity in this region that tracks intention information and the moral judgments that people are making of accidental harms.
In addition to using brain imaging, which helps us to track what brains are doing as people are making moral judgments, we've also used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS for short, to temporarily disrupt activity in this particular brain region, the right temporoparietal junction, to see what effect that has on the moral judgments that people make.
And so when we temporarily disrupt activity in this brain region, we see that people's moral judgments rely less on information about intentions in these kinds of cases that we've been talking about. So to give you an example, if you are reading a story about somebody who tries to poison their friend but fails to do so because... They mistook the substance for poison, but it was in fact sugar.
If I am disrupting activity in your right temporal parietal junction, you will be more likely to say that that is more okay than if I didn't disrupt activity in your right temporal parietal junction.
I think a lot of us share the intuition that is confirmed by recent empirical work in psychology that how we think about moral situations or moral beliefs are really central to what we consider to be our identity. We take our moral identity as central to our self-concept. And so to think that scientific interventions can alter our moral judgments is in some ways upsetting.
That said, as neuroscientists, we've assumed all along that our moral judgments have some place in the brain. And so it stands to reason that when you disrupt activity in people's brains, that you will be disrupting the kinds of judgments that we'll be making too, including moral judgments. And there is so much work on the unconscious influences on behavior.
And so whether someone is in a rush to get somewhere can change or impact the likelihood of their stopping to give money to a homeless person. And so I think that there are environmental influences. There are cultural differences in the degree to which people rely on intention information.
And so in many ways, I'm not sure that I would be more upset by the fact that smelling fresh cookies is going to impact my behavior or, you know, somebody applying transcranial magnetic stimulation to my brain is going to impact my behavior or my decision making.
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