Class 9/19

Today you all took a "quiz" (two forms) which asked various questions for you to express your opinion on. The point of the "quiz" was to point out various ways in which our decisions may be affected by the language used to pose the problems, and other factors that seem on their face to be irrelevant. When the risks are posed in a negative way, the reaction we have and the decision we make may well be different from the same problem when the risks are posed in a positive way (lives saved versus lives lost, for example). We talked about the trolley problem and saw that, even though the decisions seemed to be the same when you just look at the outcomes (one person versus five people dead), the reluctance of most people to push the fat man off the bridge contrasts with their greater willingness to simply throw a switch, may have evolutionary reasons. I pointed out that when this question is posed to a person having their brain scanned in an MRI machine, different parts of the brain are active when the two different questions are posed.