A Trolley Named Desire

OK, everybody knows the little trolley  thought experiment, right? It even has a Wikipedia page, which I shall now quote liberally from:

A trolley  is running out of control down a track. In its path are five people who have been tied to the track by a mad philosopher [or workers working on a track in the less dramatic version I first  heard]. Fortunately, you could flip a switch, which will lead the trolley down a different track to safety. Unfortunately, there is a single person tied to that track. Should you flip the switch or do nothing?

And so most people say they would indeed flip the switch and sacrifice one for the safety of the five. But then comes the second version (the description of which at Wikipedia  is under the rather blunt  heading “The fat man”:

As before, a trolley is hurtling down a track towards five people. You are on a bridge under which it will pass, and you can stop it by dropping a heavy weight in front of it. As it happens, there is a very fat man next to you – your only way to stop the trolley is to push him over the bridge and onto the track, killing him to save five. Should you proceed?

And most people recoil at the thought. Hmm, smile the ethical philosophers, you do realize that the two scenarios are identical, do you not? Killing one saves the five. But there is a difference and an important one that keeps bringing people back to this problem. Michael Sandel uses it to start his wildly-popular course on Justice (available online here, BTW).   The difference between the problems makes you think. I am not alone in the reaction I had, judging from the opinions of Sandel’s students and the tabulated results of people answering the questions. I originally felt that the difference between just flipping a switch and actually running up to and grabbing, hoisting, and possibly forcing  a bewildered obese person over the bridge railing was enough difference to make me take a less active role in the second scenario.

But this morning, while reading David Eagleman’s engaging Incognito on the train to work, I read about the neuroscience take on the problem (also listed on the Wikipedia page as I discovered later). Eagleman introduces  Joshua Greene and Jonathon Cohen, who have done a lot of research on neuroethics, much of it in Greene’s Moral Cognition Lab at Harvard. According to them and the neuroscience perspective, the difference is that interacting with the fat man up close activates the emotional networks of the brain . The brain, Eagleman explains, is a “team of rivals” and two large groupings of rivals are the emotional and rational systems. In fMRI screenings of people considering the two trolley problems, the first scenario causes areas of the brain connected to rational thinking to be more active and the second scenario activates areas involved with motor planning and emotion.

Cognitive or emotional? Advertisers know the difference between these two systems well. And so do politicians. But in education, the cognitive is still everything. The  phrase that suddenly grew larger for me on the page this morning, the one that makes all the difference, is “personal interaction.” In re-thinking the classrooms of language lessons in Japan, I wonder if this is not the key issue. I think creating a cacophony of social/personal interaction to activate the emotional parts of the brain might be a goal for these classes, though  rational minds might recoil at such an approach. It seems fair to say that affect is woefully under-addressed in courses, coursebooks, and pedagogical literature (the latter probably because of the difficulty of doing research). There is this book, now 13 years old and counting, but much of the literature seems concerned primarily with reducing learner anxiety in the classroom. But in terms of neuroscience, 13 years is  a lifetime ago…Jane Arnold, the editor of Affect in Language Learning,  says on her website that” she is convinced that when teaching is affective it becomes more effective” but there seems to be little in the way of literature that really demonstrates that. I guess I’ll just need to keep looking.

 

Sept. 24, 2012 Update: This article from NPR reports on how the visual/emotional aspect of the second part of the trolley thought experiment makes it very different.

“Some dilemmas produce vivid images in our heads. And we’re wired to respond emotionally to pictures. Take away the pictures — the brain goes into rational, calculation mode.”

 

 

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