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

Abstract

The ability to integrate the moral intention information with the outcome of an action plays a crucial role in mature moral judgment. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies implicated that both prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortices are involved in moral intention and outcome processing. Here, we used the event-related potentials (ERPs) technique to investigate the temporal dynamics of the processing of the integration between intention and outcome information in harmful and helpful moral judgment. In two experiments, participants were asked to make moral judgments for agents who produced either negative/neutral outcomes with harmful/neutral intentions (harmful judgment) or positive/neutral outcomes with helpful/neutral intentions (helpful judgment). Significant ERP differences between attempted and successful actions over prefrontal and bilateral temporo-parietal regions were found in both harmful and helpful moral judgment, which suggest a possible time course of the integration processing in the brain, starting from the right temporo-parietal area (N180) to the left temporo-parietal area (N250), then the prefrontal area (FSW) and the right temporo-parietal area (TP450 and TPSW) again. These results highlighted the fast moral intuition reaction and the late integration processing over the right temporo-parietal area.

Behavioral Intention Promotes Generalized Reciprocity: Evidence From the Dictator Game

“…These results suggest that regardless of treatment type (i.e., generous or greedy), intention always has an amplified impact on generalized reciprocity. Beyond that, such influence of intention on generalized reciprocity provides supporting evidence for previous findings in many other fields, including moral judgment (e.g., Cushman et al, 2013;Gan et al, 2016) and direct reciprocity (e.g., Vaish et al, 2018), and extends our knowledge of the effect of prior intention to generalized reciprocal behaviors.…”

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

“…As a means to answer these questions, we can capitalize on findings regarding the electrocortical processes related to the perception of moral content. These have been investigated by studies using both pictorial and text stimuli (Lahat et al ., 2013; Yoder and Decety, 2014; Cowell and Decety, 2015b; Gan et al ., 2016; Gui et al ., 2016). These studies show that moral content is detected early, and processed throughout several stages.…”

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

“…Recent brain imaging and lesion studies have sought to reveal the brain regions underlying intent-based moral judgements. Consistent with the preferential lateralization of language to the left hemisphere, moral judgement tasks in which moral vignettes are presented linguistically have revealed that various regions of the left hemisphere seem to be involved in intent-based moral judgement, including but not limited to the left medial prefrontal cortex, left temporal parietal junction and left cingulate [ 4 , 7 – 9 ].…”