January the 6th 2011
the frailty
and
self-delusion
that are central to our lives
and
how easy it is
to make ordinary people
do terrible things-
Evil often happens for the most mundane of reasons.
http://proteanstudios.blogspot.com/2011/01/psychologist-stanley-milgram-we-hardly.html
Are We Ready for a Morality Pill?
Peter Singer and Agata Sagan
New York Times
Sat, 28 Jan 2012 10:42 CST
Last October, in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by a van. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, more than a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. A second truck ran over her. Eventually, a woman pulled her to the side, and her mother arrived. The child died in a hospital. The entire scene was captured on video and caused an uproar when it was shown by a television station and posted online. A similar event occurred in London in 2004, as have others, far from the lens of a video camera.
Yet people can, and often do, behave in very different ways.
A news search for the words "hero saves" will routinely turn up stories of bystanders braving oncoming trains, swift currents and raging fires to save strangers from harm. Acts of extreme kindness, responsibility and compassion are, like their opposites, nearly universal.
Why are some people prepared to risk their lives to help a stranger when others won't even stop to dial an emergency number?
Scientists have been exploring questions like this for decades. In the 1960s and early '70s, famous experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo suggested that most of us would, under specific circumstances, voluntarily do great harm to innocent people. During the same period, John Darley and C. Daniel Batson showed that even some seminary students on their way to give a lecture about the parable of the Good Samaritan would, if told that they were running late, walk past a stranger lying moaning beside the path. More recent research has told us a lot about what happens in the brain when people make moral decisions. But are we getting any closer to understanding what drives our moral behavior?
Here's what much of the discussion of all these experiments missed: Some people did the right thing. A recent experiment (about which we have some ethical reservations) at the University of Chicago seems to shed new light on why.
Researchers there took two rats who shared a cage and trapped one of them in a tube that could be opened only from the outside. The free rat usually tried to open the door, eventually succeeding. Even when the free rats could eat up all of a quantity of chocolate before freeing the trapped rat, they mostly preferred to free their cage-mate. The experimenters interpret their findings as demonstrating empathy in rats. But if that is the case, they have also demonstrated that individual rats vary, for only 23 of 30 rats freed their trapped companions.
The causes of the difference in their behavior must lie in the rats themselves. It seems plausible that humans, like rats, are spread along a continuum of readiness to help others. There has been considerable research on abnormal people, like psychopaths, but we need to know more about relatively stable differences (perhaps rooted in our genes) in the great majority of people as well.
Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne, is the author, most recently, of
The Life You Can Save. Agata Sagan is a researcher.
Please follow at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/are-we-ready-for-a-morality-pill/
the frailty
and
self-delusion
that are central to our lives
and
how easy it is
to make ordinary people
do terrible things-
Evil often happens for the most mundane of reasons.
http://proteanstudios.blogspot.com/2011/01/psychologist-stanley-milgram-we-hardly.html
Are We Ready for a Morality Pill?
Peter Singer and Agata Sagan
New York Times
Sat, 28 Jan 2012 10:42 CST
Last October, in Foshan, China, a 2-year-old girl was run over by a van. The driver did not stop. Over the next seven minutes, more than a dozen people walked or bicycled past the injured child. A second truck ran over her. Eventually, a woman pulled her to the side, and her mother arrived. The child died in a hospital. The entire scene was captured on video and caused an uproar when it was shown by a television station and posted online. A similar event occurred in London in 2004, as have others, far from the lens of a video camera.
Yet people can, and often do, behave in very different ways.
A news search for the words "hero saves" will routinely turn up stories of bystanders braving oncoming trains, swift currents and raging fires to save strangers from harm. Acts of extreme kindness, responsibility and compassion are, like their opposites, nearly universal.
Why are some people prepared to risk their lives to help a stranger when others won't even stop to dial an emergency number?
Scientists have been exploring questions like this for decades. In the 1960s and early '70s, famous experiments by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo suggested that most of us would, under specific circumstances, voluntarily do great harm to innocent people. During the same period, John Darley and C. Daniel Batson showed that even some seminary students on their way to give a lecture about the parable of the Good Samaritan would, if told that they were running late, walk past a stranger lying moaning beside the path. More recent research has told us a lot about what happens in the brain when people make moral decisions. But are we getting any closer to understanding what drives our moral behavior?
Here's what much of the discussion of all these experiments missed: Some people did the right thing. A recent experiment (about which we have some ethical reservations) at the University of Chicago seems to shed new light on why.
Researchers there took two rats who shared a cage and trapped one of them in a tube that could be opened only from the outside. The free rat usually tried to open the door, eventually succeeding. Even when the free rats could eat up all of a quantity of chocolate before freeing the trapped rat, they mostly preferred to free their cage-mate. The experimenters interpret their findings as demonstrating empathy in rats. But if that is the case, they have also demonstrated that individual rats vary, for only 23 of 30 rats freed their trapped companions.
The causes of the difference in their behavior must lie in the rats themselves. It seems plausible that humans, like rats, are spread along a continuum of readiness to help others. There has been considerable research on abnormal people, like psychopaths, but we need to know more about relatively stable differences (perhaps rooted in our genes) in the great majority of people as well.
Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne, is the author, most recently, of
The Life You Can Save. Agata Sagan is a researcher.
Please follow at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/28/are-we-ready-for-a-morality-pill/
