Temporal Dynamics of the Integration of Intention and Outcome in Harmful and Helpful Moral Judgment

Sense of agency predicts severity of moral judgments

Sense of Agency (SoA) refers to the awareness of being the agent of our own actions. A key feature of SoA relies on the perceived temporal compression between our own actions and their sensory consequences, a phenomenon known as "Intentional Binding." Prior studies have linked SoA to the sense of responsibility for our own actions. However, it is unclear whether SoA predicts the way we judge the actions of others - including judgments of morally wrong actions like harming others. To address this issue, we ran an on-line pilot experiment where participants underwent two different tasks designed to tap into SoA and moral cognition. SoA was measured using the Intentional Binding task which allowed us to obtain both implicit (Intentional Binding) and explicit (Agency Rating) measures of SoA. Moral cognition was assessed by asking the same participants to evaluate videoclips where an agent could deliberately or inadvertently cause suffering to a victim (Intentional vs. Accidental Harm) compared with Neutral scenarios. Results showed a significant relation between both implicit and explicit measures of SoA and moral evaluation of the Accidental Harm scenarios, with stronger SoA predicting stricter moral judgments. These findings suggest that our capacity to feel in control of our actions predicts the way we judge others' actions, with stronger feelings of responsibility over our own actions predicting the severity of our moral evaluations of other actions. This was particularly true in ambiguous scenarios characterized by an incongruency between an apparently innocent intention and a negative action outcome.

Breakdown of intention-based outcome evaluation after transient right temporoparietal junction deactivation

People judge the nature of human behaviors based on underlying intentions and possible outcomes. Recent studies have demonstrated a causal role of the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) in modulating both intention and intention-based outcome evaluations during social judgments. However, these studies mainly used hypothetical scenarios with socially undesirable contexts (bad/neutral intentions and bad/neutral outcomes), leaving the role of rTPJ in judging good intentions and good outcomes unclear. In the current study, participants were instructed to make goodness judgments as a third party toward the monetary allocations from one proposer to another responder. Critically, in some cases, the initial allocation by the proposer could be reversed by the computer, yielding combinations of good/bad intentions (of the proposer) with good/bad outcomes (for the responder). Anodal (n = 20), cathodal (n = 21), and sham (n = 21) transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the rTPJ were randomly assigned to 62 subjects to further examine the effects of stimulation over the rTPJ in modulating intention-based outcome evaluation. Compared to the anodal and sham stimulations, cathodal tDCS over the rTPJ reduced the goodness ratings of good/bad outcomes when the intentions were good, whereas it showed no significant effect on outcome ratings under unknown and bad intentions. Our results provide the first evidence that deactivating the rTPJ modulates outcome evaluation in an intention-dependent fashion, mainly by reducing the goodness rating towards both good/bad outcomes when the intentions are good. Our findings argue for a causal role of the rTPJ in modulating intention-based social judgments and point to nuanced effects of rTPJ modulation.

Schizophrenia induces abnormal frequency-dependent patterns of dynamic brain network reconfiguration during an auditory oddball task

OBJECTIVE

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder that has been shown to disturb the dynamic top-down processing of sensory information. Various imaging techniques have revealed abnormalities in brain activity associated with this disorder, both locally and between cerebral regions. However, there is increasing interest in investigating dynamic network response to novel and relevant events at the network level during an attention-demanding task with high-temporal-resolution techniques. The aim of the work was: (i) to test the capacity of a novel algorithm to detect recurrent brain meta-states from auditory oddball task recordings; and (ii) to evaluate how the dynamic activation and behavior of the aforementioned meta-states were altered in schizophrenia, since it has been shown to impair top-down processing of sensory information.

APPROACH

A novel unsupervised method for the detection of brain meta-states based on recurrence plots and community detection algorithms, previously tested on resting-state data, was used on auditory oddball task recordings. Brain meta-states and several properties related to their activation during target trials in the task were extracted from electroencephalography (EEG) data from patients with schizophrenia and cognitively healthy controls.

MAIN RESULTS

The methodology successfully detected meta-states during an auditory oddball task, and they appeared to show both frequency-dependent time-locked and non-time-locked activity with respect to the stimulus onset. Moreover, patients with schizophrenia displayed higher network diversity, and showed more sluggish meta-state transitions, reflected in increased dwell times, less complex meta-state sequences, decreased meta-state space speed, and abnormal ratio of negative meta-state correlations.

SIGNIFICANCE

Abnormal cognition in schizophrenia is also reflected in decreased brain flexibility at the dynamic network level, which may hamper top-down processing, possibly indicating impaired decision-making linked to dysfunctional predictive coding. Moreover, the results showed the ability of the methodology to find meaningful and task-relevant changes in dynamic connectivity and pathology-related group differences.

Cognitive Process Differences Between Moral Beauty Judgments and Moral Goodness Judgments

Goodness and beauty have always been important topics of debate in the field of philosophy and aesthetics. The present study used behavior and event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate whether moral beauty judgments and moral goodness judgments involve different cognitive processes or the same cognitive process under different language labels for the same human act. Behavioral results showed that individuals gave significantly higher scores for a beautiful face than an ugly face when making moral beauty judgments, but there were no significant differences between the two conditions when making moral goodness judgments. The ERP experiment displayed larger P2 amplitudes and the late positive potential (LPP) amplitude was elicited when displaying beautiful faces but not ugly faces during moral beauty judgments. However, during moral goodness judgments, the P2 and LPP showed no significant differences under the two conditions. In general, we conclude that moral beauty judgments and moral goodness judgments involve different cognitive processes, although they objectively refer to the same human act. One of the most important differences between moral beauty judgments and moral goodness judgments was that the former process involved an image, whereas the latter did not. The present conclusion provides important insights into the research in aesthetic perception and moral sense.

The time course of moral perception: an ERP investigation of the moral pop-out effect

Humans are highly attuned to perceptual cues about their values. A growing body of evidence suggests that people selectively attend to moral stimuli. However, it is unknown whether morality is prioritized early in perception or much later in cognitive processing. We use a combination of behavioral methods and electroencephalography to investigate how early in perception moral words are prioritized relative to non-moral words. The behavioral data replicate previous research indicating that people are more likely to correctly identify moral than non-moral words in a modified lexical decision task. The electroencephalography data reveal that words are distinguished from non-words as early as 200 ms after onset over frontal brain areas and moral words are distinguished from non-moral words 100 ms later over left-posterior cortex. Further analyses reveal that differences in brain activity to moral vs non-moral words cannot be explained by differences in arousal associated with the words. These results suggest that moral content might be prioritized in conscious awareness after an initial perceptual encoding but before subsequent memory processing or action preparation. This work offers a more precise theoretical framework for understanding how morality impacts vision and behavior.

Behavioral Intention Promotes Generalized Reciprocity: Evidence From the Dictator Game

Generalized reciprocity is the phenomenon that individuals treat others in the same way that others treated them in the past. Besides the behavioral outcomes, whether intention information also manipulates generalized reciprocal behavior remains unclear. By conducting two rounds of the dictator game, the current research investigated the influence from the dictator's intention on the receiver's following resource allocation performance. In the games, in order to allocate, either tokens in Experiment 1 or jobs in Experiment 2, a general tendency was shown to treat others better if one was generously treated than greedily treated. Regarding the intentionality, participants who received a generous offer (vs. greedy offer) from another person (i.e., intentional) would perform more generously to another person. However, if the offer was randomly given by a computer program (i.e., unintentional), the way in which one was being treated previously, became somewhat irrelevant to the participants' generalized reciprocal behaviors. Those findings verified the influence of the manipulation of intention on generalized reciprocity, and provided enlightenment for promoting friendly social interactions.

Oxytocin amplifies the influence of good intentions on social judgments

Studies have shown that the evolutionarily conserved neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) promotes various prosocial behaviors, yet there are few studies of the effect of OT on social judgments, especially on judgments when the actor's intention and the final outcome are incongruent. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment, participants were asked to play the role of the recipient in a dictator game and to make social judgments about the dictator after intranasal OT administration. To isolate the outcome and the intention of the dictator's allocation, we developed a novel social judgment task in which recipients were told that 50% of the dictators' proposals would be reversed. The results showed that the effect of OT on social judgment was modulated by intention: OT increased goodness ratings only towards dictators with hyperfair intention. Our findings support the affiliative-motivation theory which states that OT enhances the affiliative motivation and recognition of positive-valence social stimuli.

Electrophysiological Mechanisms Underlying Time-Dependent Assessments in Moral Decision-Making

Human decision-making that involves moral dilemmas is a complex process, as individuals try to adhere to their moral values while their actual decisions can be influenced by several situational constraints. When facing a moral conflict that can bring a gain or loss for a decision-maker but a corresponding loss or gain for others, the decision-maker’s choice of resolution strategy lies in its relating to gain-loss asymmetry by placing greater utility weight on his or her immediate gains and delayed losses. Although many neuroimaging studies have unveiled the neural mechanisms that underlie moral decision-making, little attention has been paid to the temporal dynamics of how a decision-maker assesses utility weights differently for a moral (or adaptive) choice that will bring loss (or gain) to himself (and others) when the outcome will be realized in the near versus distant future. This study identifies the electrophysiological mechanisms of time-dependent assessment in individuals’ moral conflict resolution strategies. Twenty-two participants were given a set of moral dilemmas with time intervals that varied from the near future to the distant future. Participants chose between two conflicting options: a self-interest-seeking immoral choice (adaptive) and a principled moral choice (moral). Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded, and movement-related potentials (MRPs) were analyzed by being response-locked to individual moral choices. Behavioral results showed that participants took more time to respond and were more likely to make adaptive choices under the near-future condition. When the participants faced moral dilemmas, their brain waves manifested medial frontal negativity (MFN) at early stage ERP of 200–400 ms, possibly reflecting an internal moral conflict. Participants then exhibited larger late positive potentials (LPP) under the near-future condition. In addition, greater effort in implementing motor preparation was found under the near-future condition than under the distant future condition, as supported by the larger Bereitschaftspotential (BP) in the anterior areas. Our results illustrate the temporal dynamics of the electrophysiological mechanisms that underlie time-dependent assessments in moral decision-making, as human brains discount the decision utility of the moral outcomes that will occur in the distant future.

Moral identity relates to the neural processing of third-party moral behavior

Moral identity, or moral self, is the degree to which being moral is important to a person’s self-concept. It is hypothesized to be the `missing link’ between moral judgment and moral action. However, its cognitive and psychophysiological mechanisms are still subject to debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials to examine whether the moral self-concept is related to how people process prosocial and antisocial actions. To this end, participants’ implicit and explicit moral self-concept were assessed. We examined whether individual differences in moral identity relate to differences in early, automatic processes [i.e. Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), N2] or late, cognitively controlled processes (i.e. late positive potential) while observing prosocial and antisocial situations. Results show that a higher implicit moral self was related to a lower EPN amplitude for prosocial scenarios. In addition, an enhanced explicit moral self was related to a lower N2 amplitude for prosocial scenarios. The findings demonstrate that the moral self affects the neural processing of morally relevant stimuli during third-party evaluations. They support theoretical considerations that the moral self already affects (early) processing of moral information.

Moral Judgment in Old Age

Abstract. Younger (21–39 years) and older (63–90 years) adults were presented with scenarios illustrating either harmful or helpful actions. Each scenario provided information about the agent’s intention, either neutral or valenced (harmful/helpful), and the outcome of his or her action, either neutral or valenced. Participants were asked to rate how morally good or bad the agent’s action was. In judging harmful actions, older participants relied less on intentions and more on outcomes compared to younger participants. This age-related difference was associated with a decline in older adults’ theory of mind abilities. However, we did not find evidence of any significant age-related difference in the evaluations of helpful actions. We argue that the selective association of aging with changes in the evaluation of harmful but not helpful actions may be due also to motivational factors and highlight some implications of the present findings for judicial systems.

Moral judgement by the disconnected left and right cerebral hemispheres: a split-brain investigation

Owing to the hemispheric isolation resulting from a severed corpus callosum, research on split-brain patients can help elucidate the brain regions necessary and sufficient for moral judgement. Notably, typically developing adults heavily weight the intentions underlying others' moral actions, placing greater importance on valenced intentions versus outcomes when assigning praise and blame. Prioritization of intent in moral judgements may depend on neural activity in the right hemisphere's temporoparietal junction, an area implicated in reasoning about mental states. To date, split-brain research has found that the right hemisphere is necessary for intent-based moral judgement. When testing the left hemisphere using linguistically based moral vignettes, split-brain patients evaluate actions based on outcomes, not intentions. Because the right hemisphere has limited language ability relative to the left, and morality paradigms to date have involved significant linguistic demands, it is currently unknown whether the right hemisphere alone generates intent-based judgements. Here we use nonlinguistic morality plays with split-brain patient J.W. to examine the moral judgements of the disconnected right hemisphere, demonstrating a clear focus on intent. This finding indicates that the right hemisphere is not only necessary but also sufficient for intent-based moral judgement, advancing research into the neural systems supporting the moral sense.

Neuroanatomical correlates of forgiving unintentional harms

Mature moral judgments rely on the consideration of a perpetrator’s mental state as well as harmfulness of the outcomes produced. Prior work has focused primarily on the functional correlates of how intent information is neurally represented for moral judgments, but few studies have investigated whether individual differences in neuroanatomy can also explain variation in moral judgments. In the current study, we conducted voxel-based morphometry analyses to address this question. We found that local grey matter volume in the left anterior superior temporal sulcus, a region in the functionally defined theory of mind or mentalizing network, was associated with the degree to which participants relied on information about innocent intentions to forgive accidental harms. Our findings provide further support for the key role of mentalizing in the forgiveness of accidental harms and contribute preliminary evidence for the neuroanatomical basis of individual differences in moral judgments.