The feature article in the Magazine section of the New Times, January 13, 2008 is entitled “The Moral Instinct”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/magazine/13Psychology-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin and it is an essential read for everyone but in particular for practitioners of EQ and leaders. It highlights many fascinating ideas, concepts, and research; here are few of the headings:

• Universal Morality
• Reasoning and Rationalizing
• Moralization Switch
• The Genealogy of Morals

This quote from psychologist Jonathan Haidt, from the section, Reasoning and Rationalizing, describes the gap between people’s convictions and their justifications: “People don’t generally engage in moral reasoning, Haidt argues, but moral rationalization: they begin with the conclusion, coughed up be an unconscious emotion, and then work backwards to a plausible justification.”

I also found interesting a study that asked people to make a moral decision. It involved a train coming down the track and if not diverted it will kill five people working on the track. In this scenario you can pull a switch and the train will divert to another track and one person will be killed instead of five. In the other scenario the same decision must be made, save five people at the expense of one, however in order to divert the train you must push a fat man standing beside you on to the tracks. The two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way. In the first scenario most people make the decision to pull the switch but they will not throw the fat man on to the tracks.

When they looked at people’s brains in an FMRI there where clear distinctions which regions of the brain showed activity depending on the dilemma scenario. In the first scenario, pull a switch, the region for rational calculation showed increased activity. In the second dilemma, push the fat man, the regions of the brain implicated in emotions showed more activity. It appears that the more intimate one is to a situation; the emotions that are evoked have a stronger influence on our moral decisions. This led me to wonder about these implications for corporate and government leaders. If leaders are insulated and isolated from the people who will bear the consequences of their decisions they may be less likely to have emotions as a source of data to assist them in making decisions. It also made me wonder if this factor plays a role in corporate scandals such as Enron, where executives make decisions that ruin the lives of employee investors for their personal gain and does it make it easier for a president to send men and women to die in a war if they are insulated form the brutal aspects of their decisions.

I thought of Abraham Lincoln who struggled emotionally with the consequences of his decisions to have men die for the rights of others to live free as he made repeated visits t the battle field. I wonder, was it easier for President Truman to make the decision to drop the atomic bombs because Japan was thousands of miles away. Do we not march in the streets to protest the killings of innocents in Darfur and Iraq because we can rationalize that it is not us who are pulling the switch? Maybe it should be a requirement that all leaders and presidents send 50 % of their time with the stakeholders who have invested their trust and their lives in them. Maybe we all need to open hearts wider and listen to the cries of innocents who are dying. Maybe if we can bring EQ into our lives, we will do the right thing.