R: You just said that "Conservatives
have more intense reactions to disgusting stimuli, the stronger your galvanic
skin response, or heart rate, or breathing response - to stimuli - the more
likely you are to be Conservative." Now,
I have many years where I've worked with biofeedback; and biofeedback can teach
people how to self-regulate, and to modulate their response. On the other hand, people who tend to have
stronger responses tend to be more brittle, emotionally. Can you talk a little bit about any of those
ideas?
D: Well, I would just say that the
fact that, as you mentioned with biofeedback, "You can learn to change your
responses to the world," highlights how plastic the brain is. Again: I want to be very careful that the
work we're doing, and that I think my colleagues are doing in the many other
studies that have been done in the area, are not suggesting that we're
hard-wired. In fact, the second chapter
of the book that I'm working on right now is entitled We're Hardwired Not to Be Hardwired.
If we start from that premise of "Having a political brain," and "Having
a brain built for politics," because we have these constantly changing
coalitions, being hard-wired, in the way we often think about it, like "as if
my brain was a computer chip," just doesn't make sense, because we wouldn't be able
to change the responses we have to a world that's constantly changing. The coalitions in our political world are
constantly changing. The coalitions in
our offices are constantly changing. The
alignments in our family dynamics are constantly changing. So we have to have a brain that is able to
respond. Biofeedback takes advantage of
that, and allows us calm ourselves in the face of threatening stimuli.
I've used meditation in the past, or various stress management
techniques that I teach my undergrads when they're getting ready for an
exam. [For example,] take three slow,
deep breaths; and I tell my undergrads that what that does is it changes your
body, tells your body, "Hey, there's not a bear chasing you, because you
couldn't take slow, deep breaths if a bear was chasing you. As soon as you take those slow, deep breaths,
it is a way of changing the way your body can respond to the threat of an exam.
An exam isn't going to bite you, and if you calm yourself down you'll be able
to handle the exam more. Our ability to
do that is a consequence of the fact that we have a brain that allows it to
change itself, which is really an extraordinary thing about being human."
R: You say, and I'm quoting,
"Understanding the function of the brain provides fascinating new insights into
the effects of engagement with national politics, the formation of our
political attitudes, the dexterity of our racial attitudes, and the flexibility
of our moral judgments." Flexibility of Our Moral Judgments - Where
does that tie into the brain and your work?
D: One of the fascinating
discoveries in the last decade about the brain is that we can identify
particular [-garbled words-] brain systems that are involved in distinct kinds
of moral judgment. There is this classic
problem that Philosophers have talked about called "The Trolley-Train Problem." "If I see the train coming down the track and
it's going to hit, kill six people, and I have the opportunity to pull the
lever on the train track to divert it to kill one person instead of six, should
I do that?" If you ask a group of
people, very, very frequently, you know, a strong majority, will say "Yes. Pull the lever to save the six people, and
sacrifice the one person. Pull that lever;
you've got to do it. It's just a utilitarian
calculation you make: you pull the lever.
You kill one person but you save six."
So that's the train version of it.
The trolley version of it is: "You're standing on a bridge, and there's
a really big guy next to you who happens to be carrying a backpack full of lead
weight. And if you are looking down, you
see that the trolley is coming down this track, and it's going to kill six people. Do you push the guy that's standing next to you
off of the bridge?"
And most people won't. Most
people will have a revulsion to that. In
fact, when I'm lecturing on it, sometimes they'll gasp when I talk about
pushing somebody off of the bridge, like "That's crazy! How could you do that?" Numerically, it's equivalent: I'm killing one person to save six, in both
the trolley and the train examples; but we think about them, we process them,
in really different ways. And it turns
out this is related to different brain systems that are involved.
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