3 ms·
"In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permiss
by th 16y ago
"In both experiments, the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible."
This statement is meaningless without knowing how much more likely the attempts were and what the error range was for the results.
- scott_s 16y agoAll of that is likely in their academic paper, but it is behind a pay-wall: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/11/0914826107.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/11/0914826107.abst...
- randomwalker 16y agoHere: http://randomwalker.info/misc/PNAS-2010-Young-0914826107.pdf http://randomwalker.info/misc/PNAS-2010-Young-0914826107.pdf
- a-priori 16y agoI have a copy of the paper if anyone is interested. My email is in my profile if you want to read it. The short story is that there's no good answer to the question of likeliness to make a moral decision based on theory of mind, because they scored the results on a 7-point scale of permissible vs. forbidden. But, their error margins are very good. Here is an exert from the combined analysis of the two experiments: "TMS site specifically affected judgments of attempted harms: TMS to the RTPJ vs. the control site resulted in participants’ judging attempted harms as more permissible [independent samples t test based on the item analysis: t(87) = 3.6, P = 0.001]."