The Neuroscience of Implicit Moral Evaluation and Its Relation to Generosity in Early Childhood

Abstract

Summary Despite cultural and individual variation, humans are a judgmental bunch [1]. There is accumulating evidence for early social and moral evaluation as shown by research with infants and children documenting the notion that some behaviors are perceived as right and others are wrong [2]. Moreover, social interactions are governed by a concern for fairness and the others’ well-being [3, 4]. However, while generosity increases between infancy and late childhood, it is less clear what mechanisms guide this change [5]. Early predispositions towards prosociality are thought to arise in concert with the social and cultural environment, developing into adult morality, a complex incorporation of emotional, motivational, and cognitive processes [6, 7]. Using EEG combined with eye-tracking and behavioral sharing, we investigated, for the first time, the temporal neuro-dynamics of implicit moral evaluation in 3–5 year old children. Results show distinct early automatic attentional (EPN) and later cognitively controlled (N2, LPP) patterns of neural response while viewing characters engaging in helping and harming behaviors. Importantly, later (LPP), but not early (EPN) waveforms, predicted actual generosity. These results shed light on theories of moral development by documenting the respective contribution of automatic and cognitive neural processes underpinning social evaluation, and directly link these neural computations to prosocial behavior in children.

Precursors to morality in development as a complex interplay between neural, socioenvironmental, and behavioral facets

“…Moreover, consistent with studies in older children, infants' early, automatic, and later controlled time-locked neural responses to the perception of social interactions of others were expected in the CMST (21,22). Infants were hypothesized to show greater amplitudes for good actions than bad actions in the Nc component, a central negativity between 300 and 500 ms poststimulus that has been previously linked to automatic resource allocation.…”

“…For example, examining the spatiotemporal dynamics of the neural processing when young children view social interactions can help us to better understand the contribution of domain-general processes to early moral thought. Our current knowledge of the brain circuits involved in the development of moral cognition is based on a limited number of studies with young children using electroencephalography (21)(22)(23), functional MRI (24), and lesion studies (25). Due to the methodological constraints of most neuroimaging methods, no study has yet investigated the link between the online neural processing of the perception of prosocial and antisocial others and actual moral preferences and prosocial behaviors in infants and toddlers, as well as their link to parental values.…”

“…Recently, preschool-age children were shown to have both automatic and controlled neural differentiations when perceiving third-party harm and help (22). Moreover, the later controlled differences were predictive of children's own sharing behavior.…”

“…One relied on a modified version of the helper versus hinder task (social evaluation task, SET), where children witness a character attempting to climb a hill and another character approaching to either assist or prevent the first character (40,41). The other task was an infantfriendly version of the Chicago moral sensitivity task (CMST), developed by Cowell and Decety (22), in which two characters are interacting in a variety of prosocial (e.g., sharing, helping) and antisocial (e.g., shoving, tripping, hitting) ways. Consistent with developmental research, it was hypothesized that even the youngest infants would differentiate between characters that helped another and characters that hindered another, as indexed by differences in frontal power density asymmetries during the SET, and several key ERP components in the CMST.…”

Psychological and neural correlates of the emergence of morality in toddlers

“…The electrophysiological measures allowed assessment of the extent to which fast and automatic attentional processes or cognitively controlled processes contribute to children's perception of proand antisocial others (7). This approach addresses the question of whether young children's differentiation between good and bad behavior is based on a cognitively advanced evaluation of these behaviors or whether earlier and faster processes are at the basis of this phenomenon.…”