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Logic>Emotion?You are standing on a footbridge over some train tracks and you see an out-of-control carriage heading toward five people standing on the tracks further down. If the carriage hits them, they will be killed. You can pull a lever and send the carriage down a sidetrack; however, there is a man standing on the sidetrack. By pulling the lever, you can save five people on the main track, but the man standing on the sidetrack will be killed. What do you do? To most people this an ethical dilemma that can be addressed quite easily: it is morally acceptable to pull the lever.
This is an example of one of the more ‘sedate’ dilemmas presented by the Moral Sense Test, an online research project designed by the Department of Psychology at Harvard University under Dr Joshua Greene. What they have uncovered is, to put it mildly, highly controversial; and has provided some very uncomfortable truths about leadership.
Gone are the days when workers could be chained to desks and forced to work 18 hours a day for a bowl of rice and a sliver of dried fish.
Nowadays, with the pressures of corporate social responsibility, reducing carbon footprints and creating happy workforces, business leaders are evaluated as much by their moral compass as by their business acumen.
As a result, there is a new and highly profitable business booming around developing ethical tests and subsequent guidance for business leaders. Some of it has value, but much of it is flaky and has just been plopped out of the same mould as much of the baloney flogged by motivational speakers.
Where Harvard University’s Moral Sense Test differs, is that it is part of groundbreaking research into the biology of ethical decision-making, or as they like to call it, “moral biology”.
Neuroimaging technology is used to map the brain and understand how emotional ‘gut reactions’ and the more controlled cognitive processes such as reasoning and self-control shape moral judgments. As a result, they get to see how addressing dilemmas such as the aforementioned one plays out in your brain.
Students of philosophy are familiar with the morally polar thinking of utilitarianism and universalism. Students of the former hold that the proper course of any action is that which achieves the greater good for society; the latter believe there are universal principles that are fixed, and boundaries that cannot be transgressed under any circumstances. The former employ more cold, rational thinking; whereas the latter are more emotional in their judgment.
As an example, utilitarians generally support embryonic stem cell research because they see the value of sacrificing clumps of cells if it helps in the cure for diseases affecting thousands of people; whereas universalists condemn it because they consider all human life sacred, and see embryos as humans. Passionate universalists are often deeply religious.
To try an unlock this struggle between rational thinking and emotion in decision-making, Dr Greene and his team at Harvard devised a series of dilemmas that were either “impersonal” (such as the earlier example), in that they required rational thinking; or “personal”, in that they engendered a more emotional reaction.
In the Moral Sense Test, this dilemma would involve, say, actually pushing someone off the bridge to stop the train. They then used various forms of brain scanning to observe which parts of the brain became activated when subjects were presented with these dilemmas.
They discovered that the cognitive parts of the brain became activated when subjects were confronted with impersonal dilemmas. When the dilemmas were more personal, activity in the brain shifted to those areas of the brain associated with emotion. In doing so, it deactivated that area associated with rational thinking, which provided biological proof of what psychologists had claimed for years: emotions overpower logic.
What implication does this have for leadership?
The answers lie in evolution: If you were to imagine the brain as an assembly of Lego blocks that has grown, or developed, as our species evolved, those parts of the brain involved in more emotional, ‘gut-feel’ decisions are more primitive, and which we share with our early ancestors; whereas those now proven to have a role in cognitive, rational thinking – inside the cerebral cortex – are more developed.
In the words of Dr Lone Frank, the author of The Neurotourist, universalists make use of the more primitive elements of the brain; whereas utilitarians light up in the more advanced parts of the brain. This would suggest the capacity of today’s leaders to sacrifice the health or rights of an individual, or individuals, for the greater good of an organisation is not only philosophically more rational, but biologically a demonstration of a more advanced mental process.
Makes the decision to downsize in times of forced austerity the right thing to do, does it not?
Daryl Ilbury
