Sensitivity to justice and the moral brain
by Rebecca Steinberg
When acts of help or harm evoke a sense of justice within a person, it is readily assumed that individuals who are emotional will display greater moral judgment. This seems to make sense, with our understanding of justice and placing ourselves in the “shoes of others” emotionally. We presume that our associations with justice stem from a more emotive origin in the brain than logical.
However, a recent study by Keith Yoder and Dr. Jean Decety questioned this assumption. They compared the sensitivity to justice of each participant to the amount of moral judgment they depicted in a given scenario. As predicted, those who were more sensitive to justice provided stronger moral feedback than those who were less justice sensitive. For example, if a harmful scenario was presented, those who were more justice sensitive placed more blame on the individual committing the act than those who were less justice sensitive.
Yoder and Decety explored this connection further, using fMRI scanning to try to grasp the neural mechanisms behind moral evaluation in subjects with varying justice sensitivity. The results were unexpected. Instead of displaying more activity in emotional pathways within the brain, cognitive regions were significantly more active when evaluating morally-laden behavior in more justice sensitive participants.
The study predicted that if affect were more influential in moral judgment, salient systems underpinning emotional saliency would be more active. On the other hand, if cognitive processing were more influential, then executive regions would be more active. Surprisingly, in participants with a higher sensitivity to justice, executive neural networks displayed more activity, suggesting that cognitive components play a large role in moral judgments. Contrary to common sense intuitions, individuals sensitive to justice and fairness are driven by reason and not by emotion. The findings by Decety and Yoder underscore the incredible complexity of the brain and how there is still much to be understood about its neuronal underpinnings.
References:
Yoder, KJ, Decety, J (2014) The Good, the Bad, and the Just: Justice Sensitivity Predicts Neural Response during Moral Evaluation of Actions Performed by Others. J. Neurosci 34(12):4161-4166.
Ingmire, J. (2014) Brain scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion. Web. http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2014/03/27/brain-scans-link-concern-justice-reason-not-emotion?utm_source=newsmodule
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