It’s totally understandable to feel ambivalent when presented with both positive and negative evidence. However, people often feel ambivalent even when all the news is good or bad, anticipating conflict before it arises. The first empirical demonstration of this reaction appears in new study from the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.

“Many people recognize that there are often two sides to every story and that nothing is perfect (or completely worthless),” explains Joseph R. Priester (University of Southern California), Richard E. Petty (Ohio State University) and Kiwan Park (Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea). “Thus, even if they are unaware of any negative features of a mostly positive product (or unaware of any positive features of a mostly negative product), they may assume that such features exist.”

One important factor in the phenomenon, which the researchers term “anticipated conflicting reactions,” is the number of positive or negative pieces of information provided. The researchers found that the more information consumers are given, the less likely they are to suspect the existence of conflicting information of which they are unaware.

“At the most basic, this paper advances and finds support for a new construct, the anticipation of conflicting reactions. Importantly, this construct helps to explain why univalent attitudes sometimes are associated with ambivalence,” the authors write.

Joseph R. Priester, Richard E. Petty and Kiwan Park, “Whence Univalent Ambivalence” From the Anticipation of Conflicting Reactions.” Journal of Consumer Research: June 2007.

A new study by researchers from Duke, USC, and UPenn is the first to explore how questioning affects behavior when we have mixed feelings about an issue. The study found that asking people questions, like how many times they expect to give in to a temptation they know they should resist, increases how many times they will actually give in to it.

“Research on attitude formation has increasingly recognized that attitudes can be comprised of separate negative and positive components which can result in attitude ambivalence,” explain Gavin Fitzsimons (Duke University), Joseph C. Nunes (University of Southern California), and Patti Williams (University of Pennsylvania). “In the present research we focus on vice behaviors, those for which consumers are likely to hold both positive and negative attitudes. We demonstrate that asking consumers to report their expectations regarding how often they will perform a vice behavior increases the incidence of these behaviors.”

Consider the following scenario: someone you know has AIDS and plans to infect others, some of whom will die. Your only options are to let it happen or to kill the person.

Do you pull the trigger?

Most people waver or say they could not, even if they agree that in theory they should. But according to a new study in the journal Nature, subjects with damage to a part of the frontal lobe make a less personal calculation.

The logical choice, they say, is to sacrifice one life to save many.

Conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California, Harvard University, Caltech and the University of Iowa, the study shows that emotion plays an important role in scenarios that pose a moral dilemma.

If certain emotions are blocked, we make decisions that "right or wrong" seem unnaturally cold.

The scenarios in the study are extreme, but the core dilemma is not: should one confront a co-worker, challenge a neighbor, or scold a loved one in the interest of the greater good?

A total of 30 subjects of both genders faced a set of scenarios pitting immediate harm to one person against future certain harm to many. Six had damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a small region behind the forehead, while 12 had brain damage elsewhere, and another 12 had no damage.

The subjects with VMPC damage stood out in their stated willingness to harm an individual, a prospect that usually generates strong aversion.

"Because of their brain damage, they have abnormal social emotions in real life. They lack empathy and compassion," said Ralph Adolphs, Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Caltech.

"In those circumstances most people without this specific brain damage will be torn. But these particular subjects seem to lack that conflict," said co-senior author Antonio Damasio, director of the Brain and Creativity Institute and holder of the David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience at USC.

"Our work provides the first causal account of the role of emotions in moral judgments," said co-senior author Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard and Harvard College Professor.

But, Hauser added, not all moral reasoning depends so strongly on emotion.

"What is absolutely astonishing about our results is how selective the deficit is," he said. Damage to the frontal lobe leaves intact a suite of moral problem solving abilities, but damages judgments in which an aversive action is put into direct conflict with a strong utilitarian outcome.

It is the feeling of aversion that normally blocks humans from harming each other. Damasio described it as "a combination of rejection of the act, but combined with the social emotion of compassion for that particular person."

"The question is, are the social emotions necessary to make these moral judgments," Adolphs asked.

The study’s answer will inform a classic philosophical debate on whether humans make moral judgments based on norms and societal rules, or based on their emotions.

The study holds another implication for philosophy.

By showing that humans are neurologically unfit for strict utilitarian thinking, the study suggests that neuroscience may be able to test different philosophies for compatibility with human nature.

The Nature study expands on work on emotion and decision-making that Damasio began in the early 1990s and that caught the public eye in his first book, Descartes’ Error.

Marc Hauser, whose behavioral work in animals has attempted to identify precursors to moral behavior, then teamed up with Damasio’s group to extend those observations.

Rather than simply continue in rote fashion doling out the theory of personhood (the ACE model), I’ll be using the discourse between Professor John Searle and Stevan Harnad to generally comment on philosophical and scientific inquiry.

Professor Searle is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and Professor Harnad is Professor of Cognitive Science at Southampton University. They’re each highly esteemed and widely published and from the tone of their discourse, each is well skilled in the art of rhetoric. But while it may appear that they fundamentally disagree about when we might understand what ‘feelings’ are, a more insightful reading tends to reveal the REFUSAL by each to genuinely consider the other’s conceptualizations. It’s much easier to take a position and statically maintain such in the face of an opposing force than it is to stop once one is being so moved. Additionally, it takes energy to return to one’s starting point once one has been so moved. Note though that this what one is trained to do both as a philosopher and a scientist.