Steven Quartz: One of the areas that has really yet to become informed by brain science is moral decision making. Moral decision making is hard. It involves making choices, where oftentimes both alternatives aren't very good. And so we have to pick the best of the worst scenario to do.

Ming Hsu: A lot of previous experiments in moral decision making involved as-if experiments.

Cedric Anen: Experimenters put people in this hypothetical situation, but we think that those kind of experiments are kind of unreal because people don't make an actual decision.

Quartz: We really hope to be able to see how people, when there's real stakes at risk, how they actually behave, how they actually go about having to make a real decision that has real moral consequences.

Hsu: We kind of thought, you know, what's the worst thing we could make people do? What's, like, the hardest moral decision? And we kind of came up with taking food from a child. Um, and then we thought, "Ok, what's worse than that?" Taking food from a child from an orphanage.

Quartz: We decided to set up an experiment that involved real orphans in an orphanage in Africa.

It really allows us, by having real stakes, to see how people make real moral decisions.

Hsu: Ok, let me tell you a little bit about the study. This is a study on moral decision making. In particular, you're going to be making donations to a charity in Africa. This is a brochure that contains a description of the charity, as well as all the children. These are real children from a real organization, so it's important to remember that your choices will have an impact.

In our experiment, we have two scenarios. So in one case, we give people a choice between donating to one child a certain number of meals, or two kids, with a certain number of meals, each for those two kids. If you choose to give to the one kid, then the two kids get no meals. If you give to the two kids, then the one kid gets no meals.

Anen: We also have what we called the "take" scenario, where we take away meals from kids. At the beginning of the experiment, we endowed each of the kids with a certain amount of meals, and subjects will be making decisions about taking away from those meals. So they have to make a decision. "Do I take ten meals away from this kid, or do I take six and six meals away from those two kids?" And that makes the decision even harder because now they will be harming kids because they're taking away meals.

Hsu: Some people find these choices very difficult and very emotionally conflicting.

Participant #1: I did begin to develop a sense of what I'm doing is going to make an impact, positive here and negative here.

Participant #2: It was hard. It was really hard. I felt really guilty.

Participant #3: Sitting there, watching this little screen, with that little symbol, that little ball, you almost feel like you're dropping a bomb from a mile above somebody.

Participant #4: From an economic perspective, it's a decision that's made every day millions of times, but it's not one that I personally make very often.

Hsu: Yeah, she's one of the more fairness-minded or equity-minded people that we've seen.

Participant #2: I was definitely trying to be as fair as possible because, well, first of all, to have to make the choice to begin with isn't fair.

Hsu: Yeah, she chose to take more meals from two kids rather than taking fewer meals from one kid.

People seem to find the "gift" scenario more rewarding than the "take" scenario, not surprisingly. And when they find out that they're giving meals to the children, their reward area is, like, the orbital frontal cortex, whereas in the "take" scenario, they find that quite unpleasant, so here we see insula activity.

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