The Hippocampus

The hippocampus is related to character judgments. An experiment was performed by Croft et al. (2010) to determine if people with hippocampal damage have difficulty judging character compared to people without brain damage. Two groups were tested: A control group in which no one had brain damage and a group in which people had hippocampal damage (anterograde amnesia). Participants were shown a picture of "Matt" on a certain background. Lets say the background was a forest. Then participants are asked to form a first impression of Matt. Next, they are asked to rate how morally good or bad they think Matt is. Typically, Matt will get good ratings because there is not a lot of information given about him. People may think he likes the environment
because he is standing in a forest and therefore he is morally good. Next, participants are given more information about Matt. This time the information they receive is terrible and paints Matt in a bad light. For example, participants may be told Matt found out his wife cheated on him so he tried to drown her in the bathtub. Next, participants are asked to rate how morally good or bad they think Matt is using this new information (Croft et al., 2010). In order to determine the results researchers looked at the differences between the initial rating and the new rating given the bad information. The control group changed their judgment of Matt. The group with hippocampal damage changed their judgment more (Croft et al., 2010). It is possible that they have such a large change in judgment because they don't remember their first judgment of Matt, they simply make their second judgment solely based on the new information given to them.