Morality and Antisocial Behaviour

Moral Dilemmas

Trolley problem and footbridge problem

Conflict between deontology (not doing harm) and utalitarianism (maximising the positive outcome)

Moral dilemmas can be separated into personal (push someone off a bridge) and impersonal (pull a lever in trolley problem) dilemmas

  • Personal dilemmas lead to more deontological decisions than impersonal

fMRI Moral Dilemmas

Impersonal, personal and non-moral dilemmas compared

Findings

  • Emotion network recruited more during the moral personal dilemmas —> medial frontal gyrus, etc

  • Impersonal and non moral dilemmas recruit the working memory network

  • Lateral OFC → moral processing, guilt

  • Amygdala → sends bottom up emotional info to be used in higher order cognitive processes

Urbach-Withe disease (bl amygdala damaged) study

Tested personal vs impersonal, sacrificial vs non-sacrificial

Findings

  • Strongest differences in the sacrificial condition → UW patients struggled to choose the sacrificial option, suggesting they have a higher sensitivity to ocial pain

Effect of language on moral decisions

Foreign language effect

  • Native language: the immoral action is percieved as more ‘wrong’

  • Less harsh moral judgement when dilemma is presented in the foreign language

  • This depends on the intencity of the moral situation (eg committing incest vs cutting up a national flag)

  • Might be caused by attenuation of emotions associated with it

Meta analysis on reliability of this effect

  • Billinguals were more likely to make utalitarian decisions in their second language in personal dilemmas

  • No evidence in many studies of bilinguals choosing the utalitarian option more in impersonal decisions

Antisocial Behaviour

Longitudinal life course persistent antisocial behaviour study

  • Differences in cortical thickness and thickness of certain brain areas in people with higher persistent antisocial behaviour

Role of the cerebellum

  • Proposed that cerebellum-occipital lobe size ratio is linked to criminal behaviour

Measuring Morality

Convential norms: rules of conduct that society can agree on

Mental norms: established to avoid mental or physical harm, empathy-based

Moral decisions: asking is it right for me personally, within the context of society, and are the consequences of doing the action better or worse than not doing it?

  • Moral intuition (instinct, gut feeling) vs moral reasoning (considering pros and cons)

  • Theorised that moral emotions are dominant, and reasoning provides a justification for the decision once it has been reached

The neuroscience of moral behaviour

fMRI study of emotional engagement in moral judgement (see notes above)

fMRI responses to social norms

  • Social norm representation: ACC and medial frontal gyrus

    • ACC: detection and appraisal of social processes, representing social norms

    • mfG: inferences on social intentions, judgement between fair and selfish responses

  • Social norm violation: right insula, mfG, ACC

    • Right insula: fairness related behaviour, lie detection, conversion between affective goals and cognitive goals

fMRI responses to morality judgements

  • Mentalising: affective (left temporal parietal junction) vs cognitive (more classical mentalising network, mPFC, bilateral TPJ)

  • Instructions (whether people were told to make a moral judgement explicitly or not): explicit (mPFC, precuneus, TPJ) vs implicit (anterior dmPFC → spontaneous moral inferences)

    • Explicit thinking about moral judgements uses similar areas to cognitive mentalising

  • Role (whether the judgement relates to the particpant themself or another person): self (left OFC, left TPJ → processing guilt and moral sensitivity) vs others (cognitive mentalising network again + left OFC)

  • Distance between participant and the person involved in the moral judgement: distal (mPFC, left TPJ → mentalising network is involved) vs proximal (left OFC)

Antisocial Behaviour

ASPD

  • Actively seeking out and carrying out behaviour that will get them arrested and is against social norms and laws

  • Acquired APSD → Phineas Gage: large change in his behaviour after the damage to the left OFC and left vmPFC, which caused difficulty in emotion/behaviour regulation

Differences in the brain

  • There are functional and structural impairments in the region involved in moral decision making which predispose people to antisocial behaviour

  • Degree of impairment in the key regions is associated with degree of antisocial behaviour

  • Antisocial behaviour x moral decision making regions: ACC, Superior temporal gyrus, amygdala, insula, frontal regions