One year ago on Round and Square (7 September 2011)—Seinfeld Ethnography: Exploding Wallet
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Cortex Chronicles"
Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series "The Cortex Chronicles"
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| [a] Trolley Car of Death RF |
We cranked right through downs and field position yesterday. Now all we have left to consider is the brain. Why and when do coaches punt? And what parts of the brain would light up in testing if coaches were wired during game-day punting decisions? Classic pictures of coaching represent a fascinating blend of emotion and steely calm. Many American football fans are so used to this that they take it for granted that the two are embodied in the very (cultural) concept of "coach."
The brain "sees" it differently. If you doubt me, you just have to think about trolley cars.
Huh? Trolley cars? You mean...like...San Francisco? What do they have to do with punting?
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| [b] Fun...for now RF |
Well, let's see (I think I mentioned this the other day)... Just about everything. And that is why we're going to spend today's post examining the great trolley car experiments that everyone in the cognitive sciences has been talking about since, say, 1967. This will carry us far from punting for a short while, but the ethical choices and brain chemistry will teach us a bunch.
The experiments go something like this.
In the first example, we encounter a runaway trolley car hurtling down a slope (San Francisco works well in this example). The trolley is empty, except for you, the driver. You see five people on the path, and they will be dead in seconds. There is only one thing you can do. About twenty yards from the human cluster is a switch in the tracks. Your only way of preventing the trolley from killing them will be to hit the "change track" switch on your control panel and send the trolley on a trajectory toward one man working on the unused track. There are no other choices, and time is running out.
Five people die...or one does. What do you do? How do you react?
The second example again has a trolley car that is careening toward certain death for others. Five people are standing on the tracks in this version, too. The only difference is that there is no fork in the tracks this time. Instead, about twenty yards before the people are crushed, there is a footbridge. On it, you stand next to a very large man—a bulky one who is meaty enough to, well, stop a trolley. "All" you have to do to is push him off (he is conveniently leaning over, and just one little push will do the trick). His body will stop the trolley, and—even though he will be killed in the process—five people will be saved. No amount of personal sacrifice will work (you are a scrawny individual who will barely slow the trolley carnage).
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| [c] Untracked RF |
Five people die...or one does. What do you do? How do you react?
Remember that these scenarios are from the late-1960s, and sophisticated experiments on brain structure and chemistry were still decades away. It was all about personal ethics. The answers are startling in their certainty (even if no one is happy to have anyone meet a thing we might call death by trolley). The whole point of the scenario is that something terrible is going to happen. You just have to decide how and to whom it happens. So here, in a nutshell, are the results. They are overwhelming in their "certainties," even though in both cases (please note this) the numbers are the same: five people die or one person dies. For both scenarios, agreement can be found between eighty and ninety percent, year after year since 1967.
Let me pause briefly and remind you of one key point. The trolley car scenarios are not mine any more than the rules of punting are. I am just retelling the story of forty-five years of experiments in the philosophy of ethics...and other stuff. The trolley car is rivaled only by zombies (this is a very long story for another time) in its ubiquity in the philosophical literature. Trolleys zoom this way and that on the pages of philosophy and cognitive science journals, killing one or many in so many growing scenarios that it makes punting decisions in organized football (remember those?) seem like Pop Warner football practices.
The trolleys aren't mine. I am just invoking them. Don't forget that.
So let's review. Scene One: You are driving the trolley. If you hit a switch, the train veers leftward and kills one, saving five. Scene Two: You are on a bridge. If you push a large man over the ledge, five will live and one will die. They are "the same" in some fairly significant ways. For a true "bottom-line" type of thinker they may seem to be the same, but the results from over four decades of testing dispute that. They are as stark as they can be for human beings making decisions. Scenario one has the overwhelming agreement of both ethicists and individuals tested. All but a few choose to switch tracks and save five by killing one. Scenario two is profoundly different. All but a few choose to let the trolley go on and kill five rather than pushing something to his death.
Why is this so? Aren't they "the same?"
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| [d] Starting down RF |
If you think we can solve that right here, well, you...need to read a little more philosophy. Philippa Foot, the originator of the experiment, ties this set of choices to what she calls the doctrine of double effect, the main idea being that there is a big difference between doing something that has unintended bad consequences and doing something that is an intentionally bad act. One would think that saving five and killing one would be the "right" answer. Actual human beings (with brains) happen to handle the situations very differently, though.
This has everything to do with brain chemistry, you see, and it isn't any longer a mystery to researchers. At some point around the early-1990s, neurobiologists started asking the trolley question. The difference was that they hooked the respondents up to little wires that began to tell us just a little bit about what parts of the brain were cranking into high gear...depending on the question. The results were startling. The first scenario lit up the brain's frontal cortex in the vast majority of cases. In other words, people locked into...careful reasoning. Then they hit the switch and veered leftward to kill the one guy. The opposite happened in the second scenario. The bubbling juices of emotion* in the brain's limbic system were engaged here. The second scenario overwhelmingly "moves" (I realize that this is "translational" language) to the limbic system. Respondents can't bear to push the guy over the ledge. Five die.
*Remember that this is the somewhat "literary" way I like to envision it, and is not an accurate reflection of what is happening in the brain.
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| [e] Emotional RF |
Whoa, cowboy. That's a lot of questions. For now, though, just know this. None of this precludes "culture" or nuance or individuality. Don't even try to pin that on me; think about what I do for a living. Still, the brain chemistry studies of trolley car experiments give even those of us who spend a great deal of time in the "nurture" camp reason for pause. Emotion and careful reflection are going on in our brains, even as we embody all sorts of movements, meanings, and situations.
But you are a football coach (or fan). What do trolley cars have to do with punting?
I might have mentioned this before, but let me say it again. Everything. See you tomorrow.
Click here for the other elements of this mini-essay on punting and brain chemistry:
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