How We Decide

Now comes the interesting part: the scientists noticed that there was a lot of individual variation during the experiment. Some people had very active sympathetic brains, while others seemed rather uninterested in thinking about the feelings of someone else. The scientists then conducted a survey of altruistic behavior, asking people how likely the

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At first glance, it seems strange to think of psychopaths as decision-makers.

Regardless of how exactly one generates theories of other people's minds, it's clear that these theories profoundly affect moral decisions. Look, for example, at the ultimatum game, a staple of experimental economics. The rules of the game are simple, if a little bit unfair: an experimenter pairs two people together, and hands one of them ten dolla

(These are patients who have had the corpus callosum—the nerve tissue that connects the two hemispheres of the brain—severed.

ventral striatum

cognitive contretemps—this

According to Slovic, the problem with statistics is that they don't activate our moral emotions. The depressing numbers leave us cold: our minds can't comprehend suffering on such a massive scale. This is why we are riveted when one child falls down a well but turn a blind eye to the millions of people who die every year for lack of clean water. An