Judging Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs

Judging Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs Most people know steroids are wrong because of the negative side effects, but what about a drug that could improve a person’s attention? It’s not clear whether healthy individuals should or should not use medication or drugs to improve cognitive abilities such as working memory or attention. At their genesis, cognitive-enhancing drugs such as Provigil or Ritalin were developed to aid patients suffering from narcolepsy, Alzheimer’s disease or ADHD with their cognitive difficulties. So why would it be wrong to let healthy individuals use the drug to increase their cognitive abilities even further? Experts claimed that the public’s judgement of healthy individuals using cognitive-enhancing drugs is different than what scientific literature suggests (Scheske, 2012). To figure if judgements were aligned with scientific records or not, researchers recognized five key factors contributing to the public’s tolerability of using chemicals to boost individual’s innate capabilities. The investigators hypothesized that cognitive-enhancing drugs would be judged more harshly if they involved negative side effects, created an unfairness in competition or distribution, originated from an artificial source, and for invasive dosage forms. In fact, they wanted to figure out the degree to which these factors affected the
Afterwards, the participants received a questionnaire with the initial question asking, “What do you think of healthy people using CE drugs to increase mental performance?”. In addition, students responded on a 10-point scale, 0 as perfectly OK, 3 as somewhat wrong, 6 as very wrong, and 9 as extremely wrong. Subsequently, the next three questions asked the subject about one of the five moral concerns and these three items mixed up the hypothetical extremity of the concern to observe their