Morality involves social norms that prescribe and prohibit certain behaviors, but people disagree about how bad or how good an action is, and even whether moral concerns are relevant to a situation. Understanding the mechanisms underlying moral judgment can help explain relatively mundane behavior, like taking home office supplies from the workplace. But moral disagreements can also have serious societal consequences, including political gridlock and violence. My research seeks to understand the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying moral decision-making. I use a framework informed by evolutionary and social psychological perspectives, in which the proximate mechanisms of moral judgments involve complex interactions between dispositional traits, moral values, and social context. This framework leverages tools from the neuroscience of social decision-making, which articulates partially distinct networks that allow individuals to react to salient stimuli, represent the mental states of others, and integrate previous rewards and social norms to select responses which are likely to produce successful outcomes. I use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to assess neural functioning within these networks.
My current work focuses on three complementary lines of research: (1) how dispositional concern for others increases the salience of other people's distress, (2) how moral values alter reward processing during decision-making, and (3) how people balance self-interest against principles of justice and the wants and needs of others.
Salience and concern for others
Concern for others is a high-level trait that shares some aspects with empathy (motivation to respond to the distress of others), psychopathy (callous disregard for the well-being of others), and justice sensitivity (propensity to perceive and react to injustice). Higher concern for others is associated with greater condemnation of moral transgressions. I propose that higher concern for others leads individuals to generate more robust representation of other people and encode the distress of others as more salient. Using clips of harmful and helpful interactions, I've demonstrated reduced functional connectivity between social cognition and salience networks in individuals with low concern for others, including in children with conduct disorder. I'm currently working on testing these relationships using more complex and realistic situations.
Moral values and value-based decision-making
I've recently found that concern for others is particularly important for predicting how individuals will evaluate prescriptive (thou shalt) violations. It appears that concern for others leads people to have a "wider" moral lens and perceive more situations as under the purview of the moral domain. Moreover, stronger moral beliefs lead to greater fMRI and EEG signals of reward. I'm currently using computational modeling to better understand which aspects of decision-making are impacted by concern for others, moral values, and how these relationships influence neural responses.
Perspectives on fairness
Humans are social creatures who regularly interact with other individuals. Social norms of fairness help promote cooperation, and humans create institutions to maintain and enforce these norms. Economic games provide a powerful context to examine how individuals balance social fairness norms against their own self interest. Preliminary work demonstrates that when people make repeated one-off choices that effect multiple people, they prioritize their own payoffs first. Moreover, self-interest appears to occupy more cortical real-estate. The next step is to examine these effects using established groups in both competitive and cooperative context.