Jan 31 2010
Moral Judgments and the Wiring of Your Brain
My right-hand man.…
Seated at the right hand of the father.
That the right hand, and things near it, is conventionally equated with good, and the left with bad/sinister, is a curious phenomenon. It just got more fascinating. In a news release titled, Right-handed and left-handed people do not see the same bright side of things, I learned of a set ingenious experiments conducted at Stanford University by Daniel Casasanto. They boiled down to subjects placing items in either a box at their left hand, or one at their right. Without knowing that the purpose was to sort the things they perceived as bad from those they perceived as good, most right-handed subjects (with left hemisphere dominance) placed the good items in the box to their right. Can you guess where the lefties (right hemisphere dominance) put the items?
Yes, to the left.
In all tasks, right-handers tended to evaluate the object on the right better, while left-handers favoured the one on the left.
The author of the recent study speculates why this is so:
“these results demonstrate that perceptuomotor experiences, in this case the greater ease and fluidity of interaction with one or another side of space, are sufficient to generate stable associations between specific dimensions, such as space, and concepts of a high degree of abstraction, such as kindness, intelligence or honesty.”
You might say that a righty (thanks to left-hemisphere dominance) is more at ease with things to her right, and associates that ease with goodness. The opposite is true for lefties.
So there you have it. What does it all mean? For one, the god of the bible must have a left-hemisphere dominant brain, for he favors his right. For another, one aspect of human moral judgments is influenced by brain lateralization. Which is likely fully innate.
As for the 10% of the population that consists of lefties, if you want to “get on their good side” (their at-ease side), don’t be a right-hand man. Go left.
I particularly liked this statement from the article -
These data provide one of the first clear demonstrations that sensory-motor experience can exert a powerful influence on the conceptualization of even our most abstract ideas.
There is so much to “human nature.” While an understanding of this complexity may not put us at ease, understanding is good.
