To me, one of the most fascinating things about science is its ability to merge spirituality and neurology.

One recent development on this front came from a study connecting morality and, of all things, magnets.

According to the research (carried out at MIT), moral judgments can be manipulated by a magnetic pulse applied to an area of the brain near the right ear.

In the study scientists examined the reactions of a group of subjects to a variety of moral scenarios, comparing how their judgments changed under magnetic influence.

Here’s an example scenario:

A woman named Grace believes she is putting sugar in her friend’s coffee. Except the sugar isn’t sugar – it’s poison. Grace dumps the powder in the drink, the friend chugs it and she dies.

Most people forgive Grace for this mistake. She didn’t knowingly try to kill her friend. Grace was a victim of circumstances outside of her control. Overall, her motives were good.

But consider this:

Grace willingly puts something she believes is poison in her friend’s coffee. Fortunately for Grace’s friend, the poison isn’t poison – it’s sugar. No harm done.

Here most people condemn Grace. She willingly tried to kill her friend. Her motives were evil.

MIT researchers found, however, that magnets can mute motive. That is to say, when a certain magnetic pulse was applied, the area of our brain considering motive in its overall moral judgement was essentially be put on mute. All the brain cared about was outcome – did Grace’s friend die?

Liane Young, a researcher at MIT (who will be on the Colin McEnroe Show Wednesday), explains:

“If no harm was done, then subjects would judge [Grace's behavior] as OK,” she says, even if the story made it clear Grace was trying to poison her friend. That’s the sort of moral judgement you often see in kids who are three or four years old, Young says.

Which points to a larger question – how does moral cognition develop? If it wasn’t always etched into our souls by God, like believers say, or by reason, as philosophers say, then where did morality come from?

Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, might have the answer – evolution.

Haidt’s research began with studies of the human emotion of digust. Why is roadkill so offsetting? His work on how people reacted to situations where families cooked and ate roadkill led him to study a phenomenon called “moral dumbfounding,” when people feel strongly that something is wrong, but cannot explain why.

Dumbfounding studies led Haidt to postulate two separate theories of morality – one ancient and one modern. The ancient system (called moral intuition) is based on emotion-laden moral behaviors, which evoloved before the development of language. The modern system (called moral judgment) developed later once people could articulate right from wrong.

Much of Haidt’s work today focuses on probing the inner depths of our moral intuition and exploring why our minds are hard wired the way they are. He’s yet to reach any absolute conclusions, but Haidt’s work (combined with MITs magnet studies) seems to point to the conclusion that different areas of the brain have developed increased capacities for moral intuition over the generations. And that these regions have developed an increased capacitiy to work together.

Meanwhile, other researchers are exploring the social implications of morality, specifically how our personal connection with others shapes how we differentiate right from wrong.

Jonah Lehrer reports on the recent work of Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser, who discovered certain rural Mayans don’t differentiate between moral action and inaction by omission:

Why might the Mayans not recognize the distinction between omission and action? The scientists speculate that the effect is caused by the “highly intertwined” nature of rural Mayan society, in which everybody knows everybody else. They point to an earlier experiment to support this relationship between social intimacy and moral judgements of omission:

Haidt and Baron (1996), using scenarios similar to the ones we used here, found that manipulating social dimen- sions such as the proximity between characters, affected participants’ moral judgments regarding actions and omis- sions. For example, while US college students judged harmful actions to be worse than harmful omissions, this difference diminished when the omission resulted in harm to a close friend or kin as opposed to a stranger. That is, the failure to prevent harm (an omission) from occurring to a close relation was judged similarly to committing a harmful act.

In other words, it’s permissible to let someone else die by doing nothing, except when that someone else is someone we know.

What are your thoughts? Is morality a simple matter of switching on certain areas of the brain? Are there outside social influences that shape how we decide? Leave your comments below!