Moral Judgments Recruit Domain-General Valuation Mechanisms to Integrate Representations of Probability and Magnitude

Shenhav, Amitai; Greene, Joshua D.

doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2010.07.020

Cited by 226 publications

(229 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…According to such theories, moral choices are primarily seen as products of specific morally motivated intuitive and rule-governed processes. Our findings instead support alternative views that stress the continuities between the moral and other choice domains (7,8,39,40). If moral decisions are sensitive to sensorimotor interactions and the complex timing of these, then moral cognition might turn out to have more in common with how motor plans are dynamically updated, compared with following a rule, than previously hypothesized.…”

Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 58%

Biasing moral decisions by exploiting the dynamics of eye gaze

Pärnamets

Johansson

Häll

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

158

160

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Eye gaze is a window onto cognitive processing in tasks such as spatial memory, linguistic processing, and decision making. We present evidence that information derived from eye gaze can be used to change the course of individuals' decisions, even when they are reasoning about high-level, moral issues. Previous studies have shown that when an experimenter actively controls what an individual sees the experimenter can affect simple decisions with alternatives of almost equal valence. Here we show that if an experimenter passively knows when individuals move their eyes the experimenter can change complex moral decisions. This causal effect is achieved by simply adjusting the timing of the decisions. We monitored participants' eye movements during a two-alternative forced-choice task with moral questions. One option was randomly predetermined as a target. At the moment participants had fixated the target option for a set amount of time we terminated their deliberation and prompted them to choose between the two alternatives. Although participants were unaware of this gaze-contingent manipulation, their choices were systematically biased toward the target option. We conclude that even abstract moral cognition is partly constituted by interactions with the immediate environment and is likely supported by gaze-dependent decision processes. By tracking the interplay between individuals, their sensorimotor systems, and the environment, we can influence the outcome of a decision without directly manipulating the content of the information available to them. (6), and in the competition between different cognitive representations (7-9). Many studies have explored these tensions, finding that moral decisions can be influenced by priming, highlighting, or framing one factor over another (4-6, 9). Despite this, almost no attention has been devoted to how moral deliberation is played out in the very moment of choice or what effect this might have on the decision process itself. In the current experiments we focused on the temporal dynamics of moral cognition. We hypothesized that tracking the gaze of participants while they decided between two options would provide sufficient knowledge that could be exploited to influence the outcome of the moral deliberation.Our hypothesis is derived from an understanding of human cognition that emphasizes dynamic interaction between cognition and environment through sensorimotor activation, a position supported by converging lines of evidence (10-31). Gaze patterns in humans reflect the course of reasoning during spatial indexing tasks both in adults (10, 11) and in infants (12). Evidence from neural stimulation shows that saccadic programming and perceptual decisions develop together in the monkey brain (15,16). In decision tasks, before asserting their preference for faces or similarly valued snack foods people look more toward the alternative they are going to choose (17,19). For example, the attentional driftdiffusion model (aDDM) proposes a computational mechanism underlying choice whe...

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Section: Discussioncontrasting

confidence: 58%

Biasing moral decisions by exploiting the dynamics of eye gaze

Pärnamets

Johansson

Häll

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

158

160

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The specific role of the bilateral PCC is not clear, but neuroimaging studies on creative thinking have shown that the right PCC is activated in novices operating a digit count task [37]. Neuroimaging studies on the neural correlates of economic and moral decision-making demonstrate that the bilateral PCC (especially the right PCC) is associated with the expected reward probability of expected economic utility [38], expected moral utility, practical moral utility, and event probabilities (primarily right PCC) [39]. The PCC may assist some motor areas in conflict resolution after the prefrontal cortex has monitored the response conflict [40,41].…”

Section: Cingulate Cortexmentioning

confidence: 99%

New advances in the neural correlates of insight: A decade in review of the insightful brain

et al. 2012

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The first neuroimaging study of real-time brain activity during insight problem solving was conducted almost ten years ago. Many subsequent studies have used high-resolution event-related potentials (ERPs) and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the temporal dynamics and neural correlates of insight. Recent results on the neural underpinnings of insight have led researchers to propose a neural framework referred to as the "insightful brain". This putative framework represents the neural basis of the cognitive and affective processes that are involved in insight. The insightful brain may involve numerous brain regions, including the lateral prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, hippocampus, superior temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus, precuneus, cuneus, insula and cerebellum. Functional studies have demonstrated that the lateral prefrontal cortex is responsible for mental set shifting and breaking during insight problem solving. The cingulate cortex is involved in the cognitive conflict between new and old ideas and progress monitoring. The hippocampus, superior temporal gyrus and fusiform gyrus form an integrated functional network that specializes in the formation of novel and effective associations. The effective transformation of problem representations depends on a non-verbal visuospatial information-processing network that comprises the precuneus and cuneus. The insula reflects cognitive flexibility and the emotional experience that is associated with insight. The cortical control of finger movements relies on the cerebellum. insight problem solving, insightful brain, creative thinking, neuroimaging, event-related potentials

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“…More importantly, we hypothesized that the degree of spatial segregation would provide a neural index of the individual propensity to help others. Given that positive subjective valuation of others' welfare can lead to prosocial decisions (17,(26)(27)(28)(29), we expected to find that decreased segregation would be associated with greater prosociality. In addition, we examined whether and how corticostriatal communications contribute to individual differences in representing and updating self-and other-regarding values.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial gradient in value representation along the medial prefrontal cortex reflects individual differences in prosociality

Sul

Tobler

Hein

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

127

112

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Despite the importance of valuing another person's welfare for prosocial behavior, currently we have only a limited understanding of how these values are represented in the brain and, more importantly, how they give rise to individual variability in prosociality. In the present study, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging while performing a prosocial learning task in which they could choose to benefit themselves and/or another person. Choice behavior indicated that participants valued the welfare of another person, although less so than they valued their own welfare. Neural data revealed a spatial gradient in activity within the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), such that ventral parts predominantly represented self-regarding values and dorsal parts predominantly represented other-regarding values. Importantly, compared with selfish individuals, prosocial individuals showed a more gradual transition from selfregarding to other-regarding value signals in the MPFC and stronger MPFC-striatum coupling when they made choices for another person rather than for themselves. The present study provides evidence of neural markers reflecting individual differences in human prosociality.R anging from small acts of kindness in daily life to self-sacrificing altruism under life-threatening situations, we often observe large individual differences in how humans value another person's welfare. This differential valuation process seems to be the key to understanding various human prosocial behaviors, which are fundamental to the sustainability of human society (1). The underlying neural mechanisms and their relationship to individual differences in prosociality remain unclear, however.Perhaps the most powerful way of assessing how an outcome is valued is to use an instrumental learning paradigm that examines whether the occurrence of a response increases when it is followed by that outcome (2). The mechanisms underlying this type of learning have been described more formally with a computational model, known as the advantage learning model (3-5), which has been used successfully to reveal the neuroanatomical substrates of subjective valuation (3,4,6). Previous research has further refined the neurobiological model of reinforcement learning by emphasizing the specific roles played by the medial frontal cortex and the striatum; the medial frontal cortex computes the value of the chosen action, whereas the striatum processes reward prediction errors during reinforcement learning (4, 6-10).Unlike our current understanding of the valuation process for self-regarding choices (3, 6-12), it is much less clear whether learning also can be driven by other-regarding values, and whether this other-regarding valuation relies on the same mechanisms of reinforcement learning as those used for self. Moreover, despite the rapidly accumulating research on reward processing in social domains (13-19), the question remains of how neural representation of self-regarding vs. other-regarding values is related to individual differen...

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Moral Judgments Recruit Domain-General Valuation Mechanisms to Integrate Representations of Probability and Magnitude

Cited by 226 publications

References 69 publications

Biasing moral decisions by exploiting the dynamics of eye gaze

Biasing moral decisions by exploiting the dynamics of eye gaze

New advances in the neural correlates of insight: A decade in review of the insightful brain

Spatial gradient in value representation along the medial prefrontal cortex reflects individual differences in prosociality

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