Why Some Horrible Things Feel So Very Wrong While Others Only Produce a Shrug

The neuroendocrinologist researcher Robert Sapolsky, author of the fascinating if sometimes dense book “Behave” (the “biology of humans at our best and worst”) provided an insight I’ve always pondered, bringing together the study of traditional moral philosophy and emerging neuroscience.

The classic morality case is the “runaway trolley.” In one scenario, you the driver can pull a lever and divert a trolley to another track, saving five people but killing one. 70 to 90 percent of people say they would do this. But in the other scenario, you the driver must push one person in front of the trolley to stop it, saving five people but killing one. 70 to 90 percent of people say, “No way.”

What accounts for the difference? I’ve always tried to approach this question from a moral standpoint, but the fact is, we are creatures governed by parts of our brain that control decision-making, anxiety, and emotion. It’s not about right or wrong, cooly parsed. It’s about how we feel.

Test subjects were put inside a neuroimager and asked to contemplate the two scenarios. In the first, where the subject diverts the trolley, only the part the brain that controls decision-making (the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, for you medical nerds) lit up. In the second, where the subject imagines intentionally pushing someone in front of the trolley to stop it, that same decisionmaker part lit up, but also parts of the brain responsible for emotionally-laden words, plus the amygdala and the emotional arbiter of the brain called the “ventralmedial prefrontal cortex.” And the more these other parts lit up, the less likely they were to push someone in front of that trolley to stop it.

This helps explain why a far away drone attack doesn’t trigger the same public outrage as sending in actual people to kill others. Drones aren’t “people” even if they are operated by them remotely. There’s a detachment to the decision, even if the results are just as bloody and violent. Our amygdala and the vmPFC remain silent. Simply put, our brains aren’t processing what we see and read about through the same set of inputs.

This also may help explain why we can’t wrap our heads around 700,000 people dying of Covid-19 but apparently can obsess about the killing of one pretty blond woman in the news. Without the emotion, anxiety and fear made real to us, we only make a cool, detached assessment. It also explains why the deaths of others who don’t look like us often produces just a sad shake of the head and why the emotional disconnect around racial violence and injustice is so stark.

As a writer and an artist, this makes my job all the clearer. Literature and the arts matter because we practitioners *can* tap into the thing that makes the human mind and heart care about something. By telling the right story and telling it well, we can attach sufficient meaning to breathe life into something like a cold statistic.

The problem isn’t that people aren’t being too logical. The problem is that people aren’t being led to invest themselves emotionally into what they see and hear. But as any storyteller knows, it’s important to pick those emotional journeys carefully and achieve buy-in from your audience. Too much of the same note can numb emotional attachment.

I’ll be off tomorrow in observance of Indigenous People’s Day. This is the first time the White House has ever observed the holiday as such, and that feels like progress. Have a great weekend.