Processing Narratives Concerning Protected Values: A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Neural Correlates

Abstract

Narratives are an important component of culture and play a central role in transmitting social values. Little is known, however, about how the brain of a listener/reader processes narratives. A receiver's response to narration is influenced by the narrator's framing and appeal to values. Narratives that appeal to "protected values," including core personal, national, or religious values, may be particularly effective at influencing receivers. Protected values resist compromise and are tied with identity, affective value, moral decision-making, and other aspects of social cognition. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying reactions to protected values in narratives. During fMRI scanning, we presented 78 American, Chinese, and Iranian participants with real-life stories distilled from a corpus of over 20 million weblogs. Reading these stories engaged the posterior medial, medial prefrontal, and temporo-parietal cortices. When participants believed that the protagonist was appealing to a protected value, signal in these regions was increased compared with when no protected value was perceived, possibly reflecting the intensive and iterative search required to process this material. The effect strength also varied across groups, potentially reflecting cultural differences in the degree of concern for protected values.

Neural correlates of maintaining one’s political beliefs in the face of counterevidence

“…Similarly, we have found this network to be preferentially activated when people read stories that appeal to values that are perceived as strongly held and non-negotiable (i.e. “protected values”) compared to reading similar stories in which protected values are not perceived32. In that paper, we argue that the DMN is anatomically equipped to function as a high-level coordinator across sensory, motor, and memory domains, giving it an important role in the search and integration process that is required to create coherent meaning.…”

Decoding the neural representation of story meanings across languages

“…Also, a recent study demonstrates that patterns of activity in the DMN when people are describing a narrative are highly consistent across individuals and specific to events in the narrative [Chen et al, ]. Our own recent finding shows that activity in some DMN nodes increases throughout the course of a story, and is greatest when reading stories containing strong moral values [Kaplan et al, ].…”

Fired Up by Morality: The Unique Physiological Response Tied to Moral Conviction in Politics

“…These values often lead individuals to behave as “devoted actors,” following a rule‐bound logic to do what is right regardless of risks or rewards, rather than a utilitarian logic of costs and benefits (Atran, ; Bennis, Medin, & Bartels, ). FMRI studies also show that sacred values activate regions of the brain that help process deontic rules, including the temporoparietal junction and anterior temporal lobe (Berns et al, ; Duc, Hanselmann, Boesiger, & Tanner, ; Kaplan et al, ). These findings indicate that sacred values are linked to deontological processing, which suggests that morally convicted attitudes are as well, although this connection remains to be tested.…”