The behavioral and neural basis of empathic blame

Abstract

Mature moral judgments rely both on a perpetrator's intent to cause harm, and also on the actual harm caused-even when unintended. Much prior research asks how intent information is represented neurally, but little asks how even unintended harms influence judgment. We interrogate the psychological and neural basis of this process, focusing especially on the role of empathy for the victim of a harmful act. Using fMRI, we found that the 'empathy for pain' network was involved in encoding harmful outcomes and integrating harmfulness information for different types of moral judgments, and individual differences in the extent to which this network was active during encoding and integration of harmfulness information determined severity of moral judgments. Additionally, activity in the network was down-regulated for acceptability, but not blame, judgments for accidental harm condition, suggesting that these two types of moral evaluations are neurobiologically dissociable. These results support a model of "empathic blame", whereby the perceived suffering of a victim colors moral judgment of an accidental harmdoer.

People systematically update moral judgments of blame.

“…When perceivers are themselves victims, or when they are personally connected to the victim, blame judgments must deal with a unique emotional potential that could bias the moral processing (Patil, Calò, Fornasier, Cushman, & Silani, 2017) and lead to post-hoc justifications of preferred moral judgments (Alicke et al, 2011;Haidt, 2001).…”

Cognitive and neural bases of decision-making causing civilian casualties during intergroup conflict

“…Punishment decision-making engages complicated cognitive and neural processes 7,8 , including detection and generation of aversive experiences in the salience network (e.g., the anterior midcingulate and insula) 9 , integration of harm and intent into an assessment of blame in the theory-of-mind network (e.g., the medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal conjunction) 10 , and action selection/control in the central executive network (e.g., the lateral prefrontal cortex) 11 . In previous research, punishment decisions in the context of intergroup conflict were usually made to treat outgroup members indiscriminately as a whole [12][13][14][15][16] .…”

“…Harm preference toward combatants as indexed by hc was associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction, left prefrontal cortex, and midcingulate. These brain regions are involved in punishment decision-making to detect aversive experiences and to infer others' mental states [7][8][9][10] . Similar mental processes may support harm preference regardless of when conflicts occur between two groups or between two individuals.…”

Your visual system provides all the information you need to make moral judgments about generic visual events

“…Moral judgments are also highly domain general, depending on outputs from a host of other cognitive factors, including emotion (e.g., disgust and arousal ;Strohminger & Kumar, 2018;Greene et al, 2001), cognitive heuristics and biases (De Freitas & Johnson, 2015;Gu et al, 2013;Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993;Petrinovich & O'Neill, 1996;Wheatley & Haidt, 2005), inferences about mental states (e.g., Patil et al, 2017;Young & Saxe, 2009), and a person's subjective values, e.g., purity, patriotism, attitude toward other groups, and cultural upbringing (De Freitas & Cikara, 2017;Haidt, 2012;Haidt, Koller, & Dias, 1993). Moreover, moral values in turn inform a variety of other mental concepts, such as the notion of a self, and mental state concepts such as happiness and weakness of will (e.g., De Freitas, Cikara, Grossmann, & Schlegel, 2017a;Phillips et al, 2017).…”

“…Indeed, when the information about harm and agency was combined in this other work, the AI results were a close match to human moral judgments about generic visual events (De Freitas et al, 2018). A similarly promising avenue for future work may be the potential interaction between intentionality and moral judgment, given that the visual system automatically computes representations of intentionality (for a review, see Scholl & Gao, 2013), and intentionality is relevant for moral judgment (e.g., Patil et al, 2017;Young & Saxe, 2009).…”