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All well and good, except that it\u2019s well known that we are not terribly good judges of our own behaviour. Most of us look at our own deeds through rose-tinted glasses \u2013 we tend to think that we\u2019re kinder, more trustworthy, more intelligent and braver than we actually are.<\/p>\n

Just how far divorced from reality we are was shown recently in an elegant study by Oriel Feldmanhall, a PhD candidate at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University, England. She\u2019s just presented the research<\/a> at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in San Francisco, California.<\/p>\n

Basically, she studied two groups of people. The first group she asked them to imagine a scenario where they would get paid a small sum to deliver painful but harmless electric shocks. 64% said they would never deliver a shock, and on average the participants would only deliver enough shocks to earn a paltry \u00a34.<\/p>\n

The second group got the real deal. They actually administered the shocks, and saw the response on video (they were in an MRI scanner at the time). This time, a massive 96% of participants administered shocks. Those who saw video of the grimacing faces of their victims pocketed \u00a311.55. Those who were spared that and only saw the hands walked away with a cool \u00a315.77.<\/p>\n

Brains scans vividly illuminated the emotional turmoil going on in the subjects who participated in the real experiment. They had a lot of activity in their insula, a deep, primitive part of the brain thought to be linked to moral intuition<\/a>. People who did the pen-and-paper, hypothetical version had no such turmoil.<\/p>\n

So, does this mean that we should throw away all those pen-and-paper and survey-based studies of religion. Well no \u2013 they still tell us something. It\u2019s just not entirely clear what they are telling us!<\/p>\n

$\"Creative$ <\/a><\/span> This article by Tom Rees<\/b> was first published on Epiphenom<\/a>. It is licensed under Creative Commons<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"