Radiolab - Morality

Episode Date: August 13, 2007

Where does our sense of right and wrong come from?

You are listening to To To, To Radio Lab. Hi, I'm Robert Krollwich. And I'm Chad. I'm Amumrod. This is Radio Lab. In this hour, we're going to examine a sense of moral justice. Everybody knows that sometimes you feel something is right. Sometimes you feel something is wrong. We want to know where does that feeling begin?

Where does it come from? How old is it? We are going to take you from playgroups to prisons, some brain scans in between. Can we get started, please? Okay, okay. Just going on a bit. Since this is an hour on morality, why don't we start with two morality thought experiments?

Are you with me? Begrudgingly, yeah. This is a famous problem originally posed in 1967 by the philosopher Philip Affoot. There are two parts to this problem, and you're going to have to make a choice at the end of each one. Each one, what? You mean you're going to tell me a story?

Yeah, I'm going to tell you a story, you're going to make a choice. All right. Part one. You ready? Yeah. All right. You're near some train tracks.

Go there in your memory. mind. There are five workers on the tracks working. They've got their backs turned to the trolley, which is coming in the distance. I mean they're repairing the tracks? They are repairing the track. This is unbeknownst to them, the trolley is approaching. They don't see it. You can't shout to them. Okay. And if you do nothing, here's what'll happen. Five workers will die.

Oh my God! I was a horrible experience. I don't want that to happen. No, you don't, but you have a choice. You can do A, nothing, or B, it so happens next to you is a lever. Pull the lever and the trolley will jump onto some side tracks where there is only one person working. So if the... So if the trolley goes on the second track, it will kill the one guy. Yeah, so there's your choice. Do you kill one man by pulling a lever or do you kill five men by doing nothing?

Well, I'm going to pull the lever. Naturally. All right, here's part two. You're standing near some train tracks. Five guys are in the tracks, just as before. And there is the trolley coming. The same five guys were working on the track. Same five guys. Backs to the train, they can't see anything.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. However, I'm going to make a couple changes. Now you're standing on a footbridge that passes over the tracks. You're looking down onto the tracks. There's no lever anywhere to be seen except next to you, there is a guy. What do you mean? There's a guy. A large guy, large individuals standing next to you on the bridge, looking down with you over the tracks and you realize, wait, I can save those five workers. If I push this man, give me a little tap.

He'll land on the tracks and stop the train. Right. Oh, wait, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. But surely you realize the math is the same. You mean I'll save four people this way? Yeah. Yeah, but this time I'm pushing the guy. Are you insane? No. Right, here's the thing. If you ask people these questions, and we did, starting with the first, Is it okay to kill one man to save five using a lever? Nine out of ten people will say... Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yeah. But if you ask them, is it okay to kill one man to save five by pushing the guy? Nine out of ten people will say? No. No. Never. No.

No. It is practically universal. Educational level, no effect. Male versus female, no effect. That's Mark Hauser, professor at Harvard. He actually posed a trolley scenarios to hundreds of thousands of people on the internet. the same thing. Everyone agrees. Then he took it a step further and asked them why. Why is murder? Because that's what it is. Why is murder okay when you're pulling a lever, but not okay when you're pushing the guy? And what he found is that consistently, people have no clue. They don't understand what drove their judgments, which were completely spontaneous and automatic and immediate. And once they kind of appreciate the dilemma they're now in of lack of consistency, the whole thing basically begins to unravel.

Pulling the lever to save the five. I don't know. That feels better than pushing the one to save the five. But I don't really know why. So that's a good, there's a good moral quandary for you. And if, as we said in the beginning, having a moral sense is a unique and special human quality, then maybe we, us two humans anyway, you and me, should at least inquire as to why this happens. And I happen to have met somebody.

who has a hunch. He's a young guy at Princeton University, wild curly hair, a bit of mischief in his eye. His name is Josh Green. All right. And he spent the last few years trying to figure out where this inconsistency comes from. How do people make this judgment?

Forget whether or not these judgments are right or wrong. Just what's going on in the brain that makes people distinguish so naturally and intuitively between these two cases, which from an actuarial point of view are very, very, very, very similar, if not identity. Josh is, by the way, a philosopher and a neuroscientist, so this gives him special powers. He doesn't sort of sit back in a chair, smoke a pipe, and think, now, why do you have these

differences? He says, no, I would like to look inside people's heads, because in our heads we may find clues as to where these feelings of revulsion or acceptance come from. In our brains. So we're here in the control room. What you basically just see is... And it just so happens that in the basement of Princeton, there was this...

Yeah, a big circular thing. Yeah, it looks kind of like an airplane engine. A 180,000 pound brain scanner. I'll tell you a funny story. You can't have any metal in there because of the magnet. So we have this long list of questions that we ask people to make sure they can go in. Do you have a pacemaker?

Have you ever worked with metal? Blah, blah, blah, blah. Have you ever worked with metal? Yeah, because you can have a little flex of metal in your eye. that you never even know are there from having done metalworking. And one of the questions is whether or not you wear a wig or anything like that, because they often have metal wires and like that. And there's this very nice woman who does brain research here, who's Italian,

and she's asking her subjects over the phone all these screening questions. And so I have this person over to dinner. She said, yeah, you know, I ended up doing this study, but it asked you the weirdest questions. This woman's like, do you have herpes? And I'm like, what does it have to do if I have herpes or not? If I want to see, anyway. And she said, you know, she asked,

she said, do you have a hair piece? But she, so now she asks people if you wear a wig or whatever. Anyhow, what Josh does is he invites people into this room, has them lie down on what is essentially a cot on rollers, and he rolls them into the machine. Their heads are braced, so they're sort of stuck in there. You ever done this? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, several times. And then he tells them stories. He tells them the same two, you know, trolley tales that you told before. And then at the very instant that they're, deciding whether I should push the lever or whether I should push the man. At that instant, the scanner snaps pictures of their brains. And what he found in those pictures was, frankly, a little startling. He showed us some.

I'll show you some stuff. Okay. The picture that I'm looking at is the sort of a, it's a brain looked, I guess, from the top down. Yeah, it's top down and sort of sliced, you know, like a deli slicer. And the first slide that he showed me was a human brain being asked the question, would you pull the lever? And the answer in most cases was yes. Yeah, I'd pull the level.

When the brain's saying yes, you'd see a little pint of peanut-shaped spots of yellow. This little guy right here and these two guys right there. The brain was being active in these places. And oddly enough, whenever people say yes. Yes, yes. To the lever question, the very same pattern lit up. Then he showed me another slide. This was a slide of a brain saying no.

No, I would not push the man. I will not push the large man. And in this picture, this one we're looking at here, this... It was a totally different constellation of regions that lit up. This is the no, no, no, no crowd. I think this is part of the no, no, no crowd. So when people answer yes to the lever question, there are places in their brain which glow?

Right. But when they answer, no, I will not push the man, then you get a completely different part of the brain lighting up. Even though the questions are basically the same. Mm-hmm. What does that mean? And what does Josh make of this? Well, he has a theory about this. A theory, not proven, but this is what I think the evidence suggests.

He suggests that the human brain doesn't hum along like one big unified system. And so he says, maybe in your brain in every brain, you'll find little warring tribes, little subgroups. One that is sort of doing a logical sort of counting kind of thing. You've got one part of the brain that says, huh, five lives versus one life. Wouldn't it be better to say five versus one? And that's the part that would glow when you answer, yes, I'd pull the lever. Yeah, I pull the lever. But there's this other part of the brain,

which really, really doesn't like personally killing another human being and gets very upset at the fat man case and shouts, in effect, No! No! It understands it on that level and says, No! No, bad, don't do. No, I don't think I'll put push.

No, no. Never. A person. No. Instead of having sort of one system that just sort of turns out the answer in Bing, we have multiple systems that give different answers, and they duke it out, and hopefully out of that competition comes morality.

This is not a trivial discovery, that you struggle to find right and wrong depending upon what part of your brain is shouting the loudest. It's like bleachers' morality. Do you buy this? You know, I just don't know. I've always kind of suspected that a sense of, of right and wrong is mostly stuff that you get from your mom and your dad and from experience

that it's culturally learned for the most part. Josh is kind of a radical in this respect. He thinks it's biological, I mean, deeply biological, that somehow we inherit from the deep past a sense of right and wrong that's already in our brains from the get-go before mom and dad. Our primate ancestors before we were full-blown humans had intensely social lives. They have social mechanisms that prevent them from doing all the nasty things that they might otherwise be interested in doing. And so deep in our brain, we have what you might call basic primate morality.

And basic primate morality doesn't understand things like tax evasion, but it does understand things like pushing your buddy off of a cliff. So you're thinking them of a man on the bridge, that I'm on the bridge next to the large man, and that I have hundreds of thousands of years of training in my brain that says, don't murder the large man. Whereas.

And even if I'm thinking, if I murder the large man, I'm going to save five lives and only kill the woman, but there's something deeper down that says, don't murder the large man. Right. Now that case, I think it's a pretty easy case. Even though it's five versus one, in that case, people just go with what we might call the inner chimp. But there are other... The inner chimp is your unfortunate way of describing an act of deep goodness. Right, well, that's what's interesting.

That's up ten commandments for God. inner chimp. Right. Well, what's interesting is that we think of basic human morality as being handed down from on high. And it's probably better to say that it was handed up from below. That our most basic core moral values are not the things that we humans have invented, but the things that we've actually inherited from other people.

The stuff that we humans have invented are the things that seem more peripheral and variable. But something as basic as thou shalt not kill, which many people think was handed down in tablet form from a mountaintop from God directly to humans, no chimps involved. You're suggesting that hundreds of thousands of years of on-the-ground training have gotten our brains to think, don't kill your kin. Right, or at least, you know, that should be your default response. I mean, certainly chimpanzees are extremely violent,

and they do kill each other, but they don't do it as a matter of, of course. they so to speak have to have some context-sensitive reason for doing so. So now we're getting to the rub of it. You think that profound moral positions may be somehow embedded in brain chemistry? Yeah. That's a cool idea, though, that when you have these gut feelings, when we talk about our gut, I know in my gut this is right or this is wrong, really in that moment, that's evolution talking. Yeah, he calls it our inner chimp.

And that phrase bothers you? No, yeah, in a chimp. It's an interesting way. Well, you'd be glad to know that it was a phrase that was not too familiar to a guy who specializes in chips. My name is Franz de Waal, and I'm a professor at Emory University. I also work at the York East Primates Center in Atlanta, Georgia. But we'll see. Maybe they make some noise without food. Franz de Wall, well, he knows chimps.

He's observed chimps. In some cases, the same chimps for the last three decades. And though he doesn't use the phrase inner chimp, he would agree that human morality is not special. All you have to do is watch chimps do their thing for five minutes to see that, which we did. He took us on a little walk around his office. 115 acres of land here in the middle of Atlanta with 2,000 primates.

Some bonobos, gorillas. Mostly monkeys. He keeps his chimps in big stadium-type enclosures. They're like gladiator rings with high. walls and no roof and off to one side there's an observation tower on the way to one of these big things we had to pass through some woods and we crossed the blackberry bush at which point franz stopped i'm going to cut a few branches of um blackberry they like blackberry a lot this is him cutting the branches they love the young shoots you will see it pull this one out

hmm not bad at all anyhow a few minutes later we climbed the ladder to the observation tower so we could see the chips down below. 15 chimps were milling around in the heat. And then... All right, guys. This is a cool part where the big smile on his face. Franz drops the branch into the enclosure. Oops.

There it goes. Land, thud, 20 feet below. Right in front of a female. That's a young female, Katie, who takes it. She has the enormous branches of Blackberry. There's one female coming over. They're not going to be happy to share. You see?

There's a fight. So there's a fight, but do you hear it stops like that on a dime. You didn't you edit the tape? No, I didn't. Uned edit a tape, raw tape. Well, what happened? What happened?

What happened was that the alpha male, number one, chimp, comes out. And then everyone shuts up. The alpha male is coming over. He's here. And then after him comes number two. Now, the second male has taken the food. And then the two of them stand together for a while. Who knows what they're doing?

But eventually, number two takes the branch and walks toward the back of the enclosure. You see he's being followed by females? At the back of the enclosure is a hut. little building, and one by one, all 15 chimps file in after him. Now they're going in the building with the branch, which is bad for us, because we may not hear a lot. Can we see what they're doing? Unfortunately not.

But there's no need to wonder, because Franz told us what they're doing. He's seen it a million times. This is how they share. They will probably divide the saying, and then some individuals will have a large branch, and then they will start sharing with the right. See, they have the system. Anytime some food lands in the enclosure

and the juveniles get it and they can't decide who gets what, the adults will take it, lead everyone into the hut where they will divide the branch into pieces. Usually in the end, everybody gets something. We have this wonderful word. We do something nice, we call it humane behavior, meaning that we borrow from our species name to describe it. But it's actually a very ancient tendency.

Ancient Franz says because the only way our primate ancestors made it this far was through cooperation. And that's the key. So, of course, if you fall and stumble and bleed and are in trouble, I should respond to that because my survival also depends on how you are doing. That doesn't mean that there's no nastiness. Chimps do fight. They do kill each other, but on the whole, they get along.

And they've gotten along for so long that evolution, he says, has etched some really basic instincts into our brains. sharing, reciprocity, and the most basic one of all. If you were to remove the capacity for empathy... Empathy. From morality, the whole thing falls apart. Then it just becomes a bunch of roles. You know, if people disagree about this,

what's the real essence of morality? Is it thoughts? Is it feelings? Franz says it's empathy. And you can see very striking instances of empathy in the apes. He literally has a hundred different examples. But here's a really good one that you may remember. this famous case in the Brookfield Zoo where a gorilla rescued a boy who had fallen into the enclosure. This happened like 10 years ago.

It was a parent's nightmare. A three-year-old boy had climbed over a railing and fallen 18 feet into the gorilla pit. What did the gorilla in that case do? She went over to pick up the boy. As he lay injured and unconscious on the concrete, Binty gently scooped him up. She sat down with the boy, she patted him on the back, and she seemed to calm him down. Then she did something amazing. She carried him probably about 50 or 60 feet.

And then she brought him to a place where people could get to him. Paramedics quickly removed the boy from the pit. All of this was videotaped because there were people there videotaping it. It's incredible. I never thought a gorilla would do that. And a big deal was made of it in the media. But actually the response of that gorilla to the boy who had fallen in was a very common typical ape response.

So there you go. Look, I'll concede the point that, you know, When Mount Sinai happened, that wasn't the beginning of creatures learning to do good or knowing the difference between good and bad. But I will say that I still think there's a difference between human beings and apes and monkeys. It's a tangible difference. And I like, let me do one more story. This is a Josh Green story. Okay.

I don't think you could handle this one if you were a monkey. It's even hard to handle if you're a human. The situation is somewhat similar to the, The last episode of MASH for people who are familiar with that, but the way we told the story it goes like this. It's wartime. There's an enemy patrol coming down the road. You are hiding in the basement with some of your fellow villagers.

Let's kill those lights. And the enemy soldiers are outside. They have orders to kill anyone that they find. Quiet. Nobody make a sound until they've passed us. So there you are. You're huddled in the basement all around your enemy troops, and you're holding your baby in your arms.

your baby with a cold, a bit of a sniffle, and you know that your baby could cough at any moment. If they hear your baby, they're going to find you and the baby and everyone else, and they're going to kill everybody. And the only way you can stop this from happening is cover the baby's mouth. But if you do that, the baby's going to smother and die. If you don't cover the baby's mouth, the soldiers are going to find everybody, and everybody's going to be killed,

including you, including your baby. Then you have the choice. Would you smother your own baby to save the village, or would you let your baby cough knowing the consequences? And this is a very tough question. People take a long time to think about it, and some people say yes, and some people say no. Children are a blessing and a gift from God,

and we do not do that to children. Yes, I think I would kill my baby to save everyone else and myself. No, I would not kill a baby. I feel because it's my baby, I have the right to... terminate the life? I'd like to say that I would kill the baby but I don't know if I'd have the inner strength. No. If it comes down to killing my own child, my own daughter and my own son, then I choose death. Yeah, if you have to, because it was done in World War II. When the Germans were coming around, there was a mother that had a baby that was crying and

rather to be found, she actually suffocated the baby but the other people lived. Sounds like an old mash thing. No, you do not kill your baby. In the final MASH episode, the Korean woman who's a character in this piece, she murders her baby. She killed it. She killed it. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I didn't mean for her to kill it. I just wanted it to be quiet. It was a baby. She smothered her own baby. What Josh did is he asked people the question,

would you murder your own child while they were in the brain scanner? And at just the moment when they were trying to decide what they would do, he took pictures of their brain. And what he saw, the contest we described before was global in the brain. It was like a world war. That gang of accountants that part of the brain was busy calculating.

A whole village could die. A whole village could die. But the older and deeper reflex also was lit up shouting, don't kill the baby. No, no, don't kill the baby. Inside, the brain was literally divided. Do the calculation. Don't kill the brain, do the calculation.

Two different tribes in the brain literally trying to shout each other out. And Jed, this was a different kind of contest than the ones we talked about before. Remember before, when people were pushing a man off of a bridge, overwhelmingly, their brains yelled, no, no, don't push the man. And when people were pulling the lever, overwhelmingly, yeah, yeah, pull the lever. There it was distinct. Here, I don't think really anybody wins. Well, who breaks the time? I mean, they had to answer something, right? That's a good question.

And now, is there a, do, what happens? Is it just two cries that fight each other out, or is there a judge? Well, that's an interesting question, and that's one of the things that we're looking at. When you are in this moment with parts of your brain contesting, there are two brain regions. These two areas here towards the front. Right behind your eyebrows, left and right, that light up. And this is particular to us. He showed me a slide. It's those sort of areas that are very highly developed in humans as compared to other species. So when we have a problem that we need to deliberate over, the light of the point.

The front of the brain, this is above my eyebrow, sort of? Yeah, right about there. And there's two of them, one on the left and one on the right. Bilateral. And they are the things that monkeys don't have as much of that we have. Certainly these parts of the brain are more highly developed in humans. So looking at these two flashes of light at the front of a human brain, you could say we are looking at what makes us special.

That's a fair statement. A human being wrestling with a problem. That's what that is. Yeah, where it's both emotional, but there's also a sort of a rational attempt to sort of sort through those emotions. Those are the cases that are showing more activity in that area. So in those cases, when these thoughts above our eyebrows become active, what are they doing? Well, he doesn't know for sure, but what he found is in these close contests, whenever those nodes are very, very active, it appears that the calculating section of the brain gets a bit of a boost

And the visceral inner chimp section of the brain is kind of muffled. No! Me! My! The people who chose to kill their children, who made what is essentially a logical decision, over and over, those subjects had brighter glows in these two areas and longer glows in these two areas. So there is a definite association between these two dots above the eyebrow and the power of the logical brain over the inner chamber or the visceral brain.

Well, you know, that's the hypothesis. It's going to take a lot of more research to sort of tease apart what these different parts of the brain are doing, or if some of these are just sort of activated in an incidental kind of way, I mean, we really don't know. This is all very new.

And how many people chose to kill their baby? About half. Wow. That's not bad. What do you mean? It's not bad. You're in favor of killing the baby. Well, what would you do? Me? I would never I would

I must have a very noisy chimp yeah because I it wouldn't even consider I would kill the baby you would the village will go on to have a hundred babies your baby is just one my baby is my world my baby is my universe

so I don't you're gonna erase all those people based on your one child well wait first of all the audience should know that Chad Ebramara does not have a child of his own yet so you what you can't what you can't know is you can't know what it would be like to look into your own

daughter's face, your own son's face, and in that life... Yeah, you're right, you know you. You couldn't do that. Agreed. I don't know what I would do really, but if you're just asking me right now in the abstract, which is more right, well, I couldn't live with myself if I didn't act on behalf of the greater good.

Look, you know what I think? I think the real essence of a moral sense, if we want to bring this discussion to its real end, you say, what is it about human beings that the animals still don't have and may never have? I hope we'll never have. Mm-hmm. Guilt.

Guilt? Yeah, guilt. The ability to blush. That's the one expression that the apes don't have, as far as I know. Shame and guilt. I'm not sure that they are particularly well-developed in the chimpanzee. Wow. So shame.

We should embrace our shame. Mm-hmm. Which is good, because makes you spend most of my life feeling ashamed. In that we're exactly the same. For more information on neuroscientists and philosopher, Josh Green, and primatologist Franz DeVos. wall, who you just heard, visit our website, RadioLab.org.

You're listening to Radio Lab. From New York Public Radio. WN.N.Y.C. And NPR. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Iwamron. I'm Robert Quilwitch. Today on our program, the science of morality, of right and wrong and good and bad.

And if we have now at least an argument in our heads about where moral sense might lie in a brain. Now let's ask, when does it get turned on? When do you think that humans begin to get a sense of right and wrong? Okay. I actually ask that question to an expert. My name is Judy Smetana. Judy Smetana is her name? I'm a professor at the University of Rochester. Kids clearly know more than they can say. It's clear from both observations and anecdotes that children really are beginning to develop a moral sense in the second year of life. Of course, that experience increases as they move into the threes, but they're also beginning to form a much more complex or developed understanding of moral rules, which they can share with us a little bit in our

interviews. Who likes the rules at your school? When you do the interviews with kids directly, what kind of questions are you asking them? Can they change the rules if they want to? They're the teachers. They can do whatever they want. Well, we try to ask them really some very complex ideas in a simple form. Is there a rule about hitting at your school? Yes.

Such as would it be okay to hit if your teacher didn't see you? Or would it be okay to hit if there was no rule about it in your school? Suppose the teachers at school agree that they won't have any rule about hitting at school. There's no rule anymore. Then would it be okay for a boy to hit another kid hard? Um, no. No? How come?

Because that would make somebody feel bad. It would. What's wrong with hitting somebody anyway? Because it's made out of the skin, the skin. Uh-huh. Because the skin can get cut or get a... And what we found is that young children, beginning at about three, but really much more reliably by age four, We'll say that things like hitting or hurting or teasing

would be wrong even if the teacher didn't see them or didn't have a rule. Whereas other things like sitting in the circle and circle time. Is there a rule at your school about sitting down while you eat your lunch? Yes. Would be okay if there was no rule about it. Is that a rule the teacher could change? Yes.

She says, okay, you could stand up. You could do that. You have to listen to the teacher. So it's clear that the moral universe begins very early for young children. Hello. Hey, who's hosting today, got this idea to start a playgroup. And all of our kids are out in the living room playing together, as they usually do, trying not to kill each other.

I'm finding the three is a little bit easier. I'm Dana. Than the two's because my son has no fear. We call him the red tornado. the red tornado. Hey there, what's your name? Alex. And once he turned three, how old are you? Three. I find that we're able to explain things to him easier. What kind of things like rules? Rules. Oh yeah, rules.

Can you tell me what the rules are? You're nodding yes. You ask him the rules of the house. He says no hitting, no pushing, no banging heads. No heading, no pushing, no banging heads. Those are the rules. He knows. No pushing, no hitting. And what's the other one? No banging heads. It doesn't always follow them, though.

Okay, Alex, do it gentle. I mean, one of the things that we see is that young children can tell you that things are wrong, that it's wrong to hit because it hurts, wrong to take toys. At the same time, kids do take other kids' toys, they do hit each other. And you have to wonder, why is it if they know it's wrong, why are they doing this? Well, because it feels good, right? Yeah, it feels good because they got what they wanted. Some researchers have called that the happy victimizer effect.

So to hit another kid or to take another kid's toys feels good, but to have your toys taken by another kid feels bad. Is that sort of the basic information that a child uses to start forming their moral universe? Right. The task of a young child's development is to be able to coordinate those two perspectives, that of the victim and that of the transgressive. and kind of weighted toward the way the victim feels. So what we're really talking about is like a happy victimizer versus empathy. Yeah, yeah.

Hello. That's, I would say that the absence of empathy is one of the characteristics of really young kids. What's this? It's a microphone. My name is Gabby. Yeah, but make sure you don't have any yogurt on your fingers. I am two years old. You say to them, do you see how you don't like being teased, but then you teased your brain?

other and see how it made him feel, that's, you might as well be, you know, speaking in farcy to them. It's a little bit like being, they're a little bit like sociopaths. Do you think that's overstating it? I, I think so. I guess in, you know, in a very general way, that's true. But, you know, I mean, I think we were born with some very rudimentary sense of empathy, hardwired in. People are very persuaded, for instance, by the primate evidence, that that's something that you see in other species. But I do think that kids are born with different innate levels of empathy. I mean, when I happen to be going to school early one day,

I'm never early, and they have an observation closet where you can watch the classroom, and I had not ever observed. Because I'm never early, so I went into the closet. And at that moment, I saw Jack tackle his best friend, drop behind a bookcase, the rest of the classroom gather around. Then I saw Jack stand up and just look down with this very startled, frightened look on his face. And then I saw his friend stand up with his lip bleeding. And I thought, I can't believe I'm watching this happen.

The only time I've ever watched my son with a window at school. And I think he just gave someone a bloody lip. He was mortified by the whole thing. He was mortified, I think scared about his own actions. In some ways, you know, I said to my sister, like, at that moment, I regretted that I didn't run in the classroom. And my sister said, the best thing you did was stay out of it. Jack, and I'm full. Jack had to see the consequences of his own actions on his own terms.

Seeds in the dirt, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. Help me with my garden. Sun in the sky, shine, shine, shine. Sun in the sky, shine, shine, shine, shine, shine. Sun in the sky. Shine, shine, shine. Help me with my garden.

I love that song. I love that song, too. Thank you, Jack, and also Jack's parents. William and Tori Brangham. And thanks also to Dana, Missy, Elena, and Fay for letting us eavesdrop on their playgroup. And thanks also to our experts, Judy Smetana, Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester, and to Larry Nucci, Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Well, if this moral sense gets turned on when you're three or four, there are some moments in your life where you get so embarrassed by something that you did that your mortal sense never turns off. That's the next story. producer Amy O'Leary. For her, that moment came in the fourth grade. During a game, her class played called Homestead, sort of a cross between Dungeons and Dragons and Monopoly. It was supposed to teach kids about pioneer history. Amy felt so bad about how she acted in this game that many

years later, she wrote her teacher a letter, and he never responded. So she went to see him. So where's your classroom? Down this way. Okay. The kids are off in. P.E. As we walk through the hallway, I realize why I'm feeling so disoriented. I'm a grown-up with a 401k, and the doorknobbs in the school come up to my knees.

When we sit down for the interview part of the interview, where I'm supposed to ask Mr. Riggs about this game we played, frankly, all I could think of was the most obvious question. So, how are you? Older, balder, grayer, fatter. Still teaching, probably have still six or seven years left to go. How many? 34.

34 years. Yeah, I've been teaching probably longer than half the staff's been alive. Um, you still play homestead? Yes, we're still trying to do it. You just grabbed your four. head and hit this look of anguish. What was that for? This class, this has been

a difficult class. Some of them will do it, some of them won't, some of them will remember it. You remembered it. Did everyone in the class remember it? I already knew the answer to that. Because I checked. I found Jeff in L.A. Jeff, do you remember Homestead?

Vagely. And Dale in Phoenix. Dale, do you remember the Homestead game that we played? Um, vaguely. And Stephah, who I met at a bar in Brooklyn, where she works. Do you remember Homestead the game? No. Not as much as you do, obviously. Yeah, Mr. Bigg remembered it. Once you start talking about, I may remember it.

So it was the simulation game that we were supposed to be like prairie settlers, right? And there's this big plywood map at the front of the classroom. We have these little booklets that were sort of black and white booklets. These are the booklets you use. Wow. Standing in this classroom, I remember everything about the game. I hold this and I have a flood of memories.

I remember the power and the slum wording, the price gouging. But I think the purpose of the game was to teach us something about the history of the kinds of people who had to settle the West. You were assigned a character and a plot of land. And every day you played it, each individual student would have a different fortune. You might roll a one and there'd be a drought and you wouldn't get any money off of your land or you'd roll a six. And that meant there was a bumper crop. I mean, it was a lot like a monopoly game. With that in mind, I've got the board there.

Oh, my, is that the same board? Yeah, it's the same board. Oh, let's look at it. I remembered this. And so, just as luck would have it, one of the very first things that happened in the game is that Mr. Riggs announced that this land... The square in the middle there, land square 18.

My land. That's the piece of land that I had. Would be the center of town. So you got to sell all the town property and everything and kind of run the town. And what did you think of this? I knew at the time it would help me win the game. I thought this is lucky.

I have something that nobody else has. I mean, I thought it was further evidence that I was special. It was always a good student, and I thought like, well, you know, this is what good students, you get rewarded with lucky things. So then what did you do? Well, I started by forming a company. We'd go to a kid. We'd say, hey, do you want to join our company? They'd be like, well, what's that?

And we say, well, we're going to be a company and we're going to be all together. You give us your land. and we'll give you a place in the town to live in. Everybody wants to move to the town. Don't you want to be in the town? Meanwhile, I'll take all the profits from your farmland. You know, you could get $200 to $1,000 a year on your crops on your land, and then we would pay them $50 a year.

It was a simulation game, so nobody actually had to go out and work their fields to reap the profits off the land. But these people basically sold themselves into a very low-wage, kind of slavery situation. And all the other nine-year-olds went for this? Yes. Why? Peer pressure.

They thought we were the cool kids. They would all say yes. That's what I remember. Almost no one turned us down. And once you've got 20 kids who are part of the company... Oh my God, I can do whatever I want. Crazy total power. Anything.

Any bullying tactic. I mean, there were things that would come up. The booklet would say, okay, your family's having a medical problem. You need to pay the doctor. My baby's sick. My baby's sick. The doctor worked for our company. The doctor would overcharge the people who were not in the company.

If you were not part of the company, it was going to cost you a lot of money. More money than any of these people had. Sheesh. And that wasn't even the worst of it. I do somewhat remember that whole episode of... That's Dale again. ...of us having to actually stop the game early. He didn't remember much, but he remembered the money.

It's hard to forget the money. You had flooded the whole game with counterfeit money. Everybody else's wasn't worth it any. else's wasn't worth anything anymore. Well, the game used monopoly money to begin with. Once we got big enough, where we realized nobody could really track our finances, we just started bringing it in from home.

We actually brought in life money and monopoly money from home and flooded the classroom currency market. It was an absurd amount of money. In hindsight, I thought that you had to notice that. It was kind of noticeable because I was stamping the money with a Grasjo-Marx stamp I had on the back and that was the real stuff

and anything without the garage show was the counterfeit no class has taken it as far as you guys did so did mr riggs ever tell you this was wrong no never I mean never said it explicitly he just sort of one day called this meeting

so I remember this meeting very clearly you brought us all up to the front of the room and six kids, frustrated, gathered her on one side of Mr. Riggs' big teacher's desk. I stood on the other. And you said, we don't exactly think this is fair, but you didn't tell us it was wrong, or that you're cheating or you're counterfeiting money, and I know it.

What I remember was that you raised the question. He asked me, what are you going to do about this? A long pause. He wasn't punishing me, or saying it was against the rules exactly. I couldn't figure out what was going on. We were winning. What was I going to do about it? Nothing, I told him.

And that's when he gave me this look. It was almost like there was sort of a quiet disappointment that you'd had. Like, all the hope he'd had for me as a human being just slid right off his face. Did that help develop a conscience in you? Has that ever come back so that you think about things differently? Utterly. Like, that's exactly why I've remembered this for so long. and so well. It stuck with me as this lesson of even if you're not going to get punished

for something, it still can be wrong. Because then it was successful if that has happened. Do you do that on purpose? I think I did it on purpose then because it was one of those teachable moments that happens and you just revel in it, you know, how wonderful it is that this was presented me you know my classmate Dale put things into perspective

everybody does things when they're that age that make you feel bad to learn what's right or wrong right do you have things like that um

what he told me next caught me off guard yeah Travis Sherman was a friend of mine that lived in the neighborhood and we were the best of friends you know riding our bikes around town

and we were coming home crossing a freeway off ramp and I was in front of Travis I made it across and the next thing I remember hearing is just squealing tires and I look around and Travis is half underneath this car out in the intersection I remember him kind of half standing up and his leg was folded up like origami almost just trashed and he just kind of looked up at me and so god deal my leg and he fell back down. I couldn't have been more than six, but for whatever reason,

I didn't go back to him. I just turned around and I got on my bike and I just rode off. I don't even think I told my mom about it. He tried calling from the hospital several times, and I just remember going, no, I don't want to talk to him. I don't want to talk to him.

My mom finally says, no, you're going to talk to him whether you like it or not. And when I finally did get on the phone, and I just clearly remember him asking me, why did you do that? How come he didn't come back for me? And I didn't have an answer for him. To this day, it's one of those things that still bugs me about myself.

Even though I was only that old, that still bothers me that I would do that, that I would turn around and leave somebody who needs help like that. Maybe that factors into how I am as a person today. You know, it's like I'll help anybody I can, just because I don't want to have that. feeling again. I asked Dale if he could erase that day from his life, Woody. Now, he said, not in a million years. It's part of who he is now. And who he is now is the kind of guy who will come

and pick you up in the middle of the desert when your car breaks down at 3 a.m. No questions asked. He's a really loyal friend, a good person. I didn't go back to see Mr. Briggs to resolve anything. I didn't need him to say that deep down he always thought it was a good kid. or that he's no longer disappointed in me. What matters is that once he was disappointed in me, and I think about that all the time. Do you find that with kids this age that that particular lesson is one that they're sorting through right now,

the kids who are eight, nine years old? Yeah, they're sorting through that. Is there a right, is there a wrong? What is morality? Is it a sense of fairness? I mean, these kids have got fairness down to the nth degree. they can look at one of these cupcakes and tell you to the ounce which one's bigger. And if somebody else gets it, it's not fair and everything else.

Is that morality? But I think if people are left alone, that they have a tendency to do the right thing. Kids have the tendency to do the right thing. There are several kids that I don't think will ever have a grasp of that. and whether it's genetics or very early family background. How can you tell that so early? When you see a child that consistently pokes, consistently cuts, cheats, steals, lies, whatever,

and I'm saying at three, at four, at five, not just in third grade, I think that child's curse, doomed, whatever, for the rest of their lives. I'm the carpet. I'm the carpet. We'll write your name. I spend the rest of the day with Mr. Riggs' class, thinking about what he said, watching his third graders.

Why don't you just go with the account right now? I ask Athen, a kid in the front row, what the rules are. Could you? Tell me what the rules are in this room? Um, well, you've got three of them right up there. He points to a poster, and I remember that, too. It acts safely. Respect those are yours in your own.

property. And at the top, rule number one. Do what you know is right. Do what you know is right. Those work pretty well? Yeah, they actually sometimes do. Thanks to Amy O'Leary for producing that story. One more story like it coming up. On Radio Lab, stay with us. You're listening to Radio Lab.

From New York Public Radio. W.N.Y.C. And NPR. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad Abumran. And I'm Robert Krelwich. This hour we've been looking at morality, good and bad, right and wrong. Now let us say that you are wrong, but you have done something bad. And that the society around you says, you know, you're guilty.

If you go back 250 years, the city fathers of Philadelphia had an interesting way to make its citizens own up to their guilt. It is a giant Gothic castle that still sits today in the middle of downtown Philadelphia, except it's no longer occupied, and it's fallen apart. We sent producer Josh Braun to take a look. Well, do you want to just walk over and look around a little bit? Can we look around a little bit? Sure. Yeah, you bet.

Come on in. The building is truly a ruin. There used to be two huge oak doors here, and they had iron studs off. This building is based on a profoundly optimistic view of human nature. Imagine swinging this giant door. that all people are inherently good. And you, being our new inmate, first thing you'd have your head covered with a hood. That every human being in their heart had an instinct to behave right, to do the right thing.

So they argued for a prison that would house every man and every woman in a profound isolation. They thought that isolation would encourage spiritual reflection, and the prisoners would become penitent. This is the world's first true penitentiary. a building designed to make someone penitent, genuinely sorry for what they did. I'm going to walk down here. They called this a south corridor. This big arched corridor. Quaker prison reformers argued that the inmates should be totally cut off from the outside world. And so they didn't allow them to get letters from home. They didn't allow them any books aside from a copy of the King James Bible.

They were looking for near total sensory deprivation. They wanted you to see the four white walls of your 8x12 cell and not a whole lot else for years. So here you are inside of your cell. You can see it has a cot in it with a simple mattress stuffed with straw. And those over there are tools for making shoes. The cell always amazes me every time is how high the ceiling is. 16 foot vaulted ceilings. It's got this beautiful arch to it.

And then they have that skylight that called them the eye of God, daylight that came down through this circular opening that's supposed to mimic the look of an eye looking down at you. Remember, you're supposed to be going through a profound spiritual reflection while you're here. And so they wanted all the light to come down from above. And on a gray day like this, you really get a sense for how gloomy this cell would have been. You stay here for one second. I'll be right back. I'll see you in a few minutes.

We have a letter from an inmate. He wrote to his mother saying, I've just received word that I will serve my sentence in the eastern state penitentiary in silence, an incredible crushing isolation. Please endeavor to secure for me a pardon. The people who ran this prison were fascinated by silence. They just fetishized the idea of totally,

They wanted the inmates' life back here in these cells to be almost completely silent. And so as they walked up and down the corridors, the guards would put socks over their shoes so that you wouldn't hear the footsteps. And as they rolled carts of food to deliver meals here in the cells, it covered the wheels of the cart with leather, so they would roll in silence. silence. A friend of my mother's was telling me about his time in the Peace Corps, and he was in Gabon, Africa, and he was in the jungle. And he said the jungle was so dense, they would only carve out chunks of jungle big enough for the exact spaces that they needed, for little gathering spots

or for their houses. But if they left something for a couple of weeks, it'd be just a jungle again. And after two years of being in this village, he went off to visit a friend in Kenya and went out to the planes. And he said his eyes physically couldn't focus on distances further than about 10 feet out because they hadn't done it in two years. He said the entire time that he was out there, he felt exposed, like there was things behind him that he couldn't see. And all could think about was Eastern State Penitentiary, and being these little cells of about 8 by 12 for years. And then you walk out, and the first thing you see is the prison itself extending 680 feet near the direction. It must have freaked people out. You know, there was this growing debable.

that prolonged isolation could cause insanity, that it could cause emotional breakdown. So what looked to be optimistic in the 1830s looked pretty cynical by the 1860s. By about the building's 100th birthday, they'd given up the idea of solitary confinement, and they were holding inmates here for life sentences. The walls were built with the idea that people are inherently good,

and by the end they were housing all these inmates who apparently they had assumed were inherently evil, were inherently evil. Lock up behind us. These days our major security concerns people getting in. Vandals, all that kind of stuff. Josh Braun produced that audio tour

with recording help from Sally Herships. And the voice you heard was Sean Kelly. For more information on Eastern State Penitentiary or the science of morality or anything that you heard this hour, visit our website. What's the address? The address is...

Come on, you should have it memorized by now. Oh, a radio lab.org? RadioLab.org. And while you're there, let us know what you think. Our email address is RadioLab at WNYC.org. I'm Chad Abumrad. And I'm Robert Quillwich. And we're signing off.

Radio Lab is produced by Chad Abimrad and Ellen Horn with help from Sarah Pellegrini, Melissa Kevall, Amber Sealy, and Sirissa Tanner. Special thanks to David Martin and to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. And to me, Dale Keys. Radio Lab is produced by New York Public Radio, WNYC, and distributed by NPR.