Can moral reasoning be modeled in an experiment?
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Grac J
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8191952 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Stem-cell research. Euthanasia. Personhood. Marriage equality. School shootings. Gun control. Death penalty. Ethical dilemmas regularly spark fierce debate about the underlying moral fabric of societies. How do we prepare today's children to be fully informed and thoughtful citizens, capable of moral and ethical decisions? Current approaches to moral education are controversial, requiring adults to serve as either direct ('top-down') or indirect ('bottom-up') conduits of information about morality. A common thread weaving throughout these two educational initiatives is the ability to take multiple perspectives - increases in perspective taking ability have been found to precede advances in moral reasoning. We propose gesture as a behavior uniquely situated to augment perspective taking ability. Requiring gesture during spatial tasks has been shown to catalyze the production of more sophisticated problem-solving strategies, allowing children to profit from instruction. Our data demonstrate that requiring gesture during moral reasoning tasks has similar effects, resulting in increased perspective taking ability subsequent to instruction. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v/gAcRIClU_GY.
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Project description:In the last decade, scientific literature provided solid evidence of cognitive deficits in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patients and their effects on end-life choices. However, moral cognition and judgment are still poorly investigated in this population. Here we aimed at evaluating both socio-cognitive and socio-affective components of moral reasoning in a sample of 28 ALS patients. Patients underwent clinical and neuropsychological evaluation including basic cognitive and social cognition measures. Additionally, we administered an experimental task including moral dilemmas, with instrumental and incidental conditions. Patients' performances were compared with a control group [healthy control (HC)], including 36 age-, gender-, and education-matched healthy subjects. Despite that the judgment pattern was comparable in ALS and HC, patients resulted less prone to carry out a moral transgression compared to HC. Additionally, ALS patients displayed higher levels of moral permissibility and lower emotional arousal, with similar levels of engagement in both instrumental and incidental conditions. Our findings expanded the current literature about cognitive deficits in ALS, showing that in judging moral actions, patients may present non-utilitarian choices and emotion flattening. Such a decision-making profile may have relevant implications in applying moral principles in real-life situations and for the judgment of end-of-life treatments and care in clinical settings.
| S-EPMC7471658 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Background and objectivesHuman morality has been investigated using a variety of tasks ranging from judgments of hypothetical dilemmas to viewing morally salient stimuli. These experiments have provided insight into neural correlates of moral judgments and emotions, yet these approaches reveal important differences in moral cognition. Moral reasoning tasks require active deliberation while moral emotion tasks involve the perception of stimuli with moral implications. We examined convergent and divergent brain activity associated with these experimental paradigms taking a quantitative meta-analytic approach.Data sourceA systematic search of the literature yielded 40 studies. Studies involving explicit decisions in a moral situation were categorized as active (n = 22); studies evoking moral emotions were categorized as passive (n = 18). We conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis using the Activation Likelihood Estimation to determine reliable patterns of brain activity.Results & conclusionsResults revealed a convergent pattern of reliable brain activity for both task categories in regions of the default network, consistent with the social and contextual information processes supported by this brain network. Active tasks revealed more reliable activity in the temporoparietal junction, angular gyrus and temporal pole. Active tasks demand deliberative reasoning and may disproportionately involve the retrieval of social knowledge from memory, mental state attribution, and construction of the context through associative processes. In contrast, passive tasks reliably engaged regions associated with visual and emotional information processing, including lingual gyrus and the amygdala. A laterality effect was observed in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, with active tasks engaging the left, and passive tasks engaging the right. While overlapping activity patterns suggest a shared neural network for both tasks, differential activity suggests that processing of moral input is affected by task demands. The results provide novel insight into distinct features of moral cognition, including the generation of moral context through associative processes and the perceptual detection of moral salience.
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Project description:Recent neuroimaging studies suggest lateralized cerebral mechanisms in the right temporal parietal junction are involved in complex social and moral reasoning, such as ascribing beliefs to others. Based on this evidence, we tested 3 anterior-resected and 3 complete callosotomy patients along with 22 normal subjects on a reasoning task that required verbal moral judgments. All 6 patients based their judgments primarily on the outcome of the actions, disregarding the beliefs of the agents. The similarity in performance between complete and partial callosotomy patients suggests that normal judgments of morality require full interhemispheric integration of information critically supported by the right temporal parietal junction and right frontal processes.
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Project description:In our study, we tried to clarify whether patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) reveal different moral decision patterns as compared to healthy subjects and whether common social interaction difficulties in ASD are reflected in altered brain activation during different aspects of moral reasoning. 28 patients with high-functioning ASD and 28 healthy subjects matched for gender, age and education took part in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Participants were confronted with textual dilemma situations followed by proposed solutions to which they could agree or disagree. On a neural level, moral decision making was associated with activation in anterior medial prefrontal regions, the temporo-parietal junction and the precuneus for both groups. However, while patients and healthy controls did not exhibit significant behavioral differences, ASD patients showed decreased activation in limbic regions, particularly the amygdala, as well as increased activation in the anterior and the posterior cingulate gyrus during moral reasoning. Alterations of brain activation in patients might thus indicate specific impairments in empathy. However, activation increases in brain regions associated with the 'default mode network' and self-referential cognition also provide evidence for an altered way of patients' cerebral processing with regard to decision making based on social information.
| S-EPMC3739915 | biostudies-literature
Project description:The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced novel public health measures such as masking and social distancing. In adults, framing these behaviors as benefiting others versus the self has been shown to affect people's perceptions of public health measures and willingness to comply. Here we asked whether self- versus other-oriented frames of novel public health measures influence children's endorsement and moral reasoning. Children aged 5 to 10 years viewed hypothetical dilemmas of aliens in which we manipulated the frame (other-oriented or self-oriented) of the prevention behavior and the severity (high or low) of the potential harm. Across two studies (Study 1: N = 48; Study 2: N = 61), results showed that across ages framing the behaviors as other-oriented, but not self-oriented, yielded more positive ratings of individuals who followed the public health measures and more negative ratings of those who did not. Across both frames, children generally endorsed these public health measures when the severity was high. Children used more moralizing concepts in other-oriented frames and were more critical of intentional transgressions over accidental transgressions, demonstrating further evidence that other-oriented frames induce moral reasoning. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these framing effects for sociomoral reasoning and action.
| S-EPMC9868488 | biostudies-literature
Project description:As large language models (LLMs) have become more deeply integrated into various sectors, understanding how they make moral judgements has become crucial, particularly in the realm of autonomous driving. This study used the moral machine framework to investigate the ethical decision-making tendencies of prominent LLMs, including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, PaLM 2 and Llama 2, to compare their responses with human preferences. While LLMs' and humans' preferences such as prioritizing humans over pets and favouring saving more lives are broadly aligned, PaLM 2 and Llama 2, especially, evidence distinct deviations. Additionally, despite the qualitative similarities between the LLM and human preferences, there are significant quantitative disparities, suggesting that LLMs might lean toward more uncompromising decisions, compared with the milder inclinations of humans. These insights elucidate the ethical frameworks of LLMs and their potential implications for autonomous driving.
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Project description:Large-scale brain networks are integral to the coordination of human behaviour, and their anatomy provides insights into the clinical presentation and progression of neurodegenerative illnesses such as Alzheimer's disease, which targets the default mode network, and behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia, which targets a more anterior salience network. Although the default mode network is recruited when healthy subjects deliberate about 'personal' moral dilemmas, patients with Alzheimer's disease give normal responses to these dilemmas whereas patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia give abnormal responses to these dilemmas. We hypothesized that this apparent discrepancy between activation- and patient-based studies of moral reasoning might reflect a modulatory role for the salience network in regulating default mode network activation. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to characterize network activity of patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia and healthy control subjects, we present four converging lines of evidence supporting a causal influence from the salience network to the default mode network during moral reasoning. First, as previously reported, the default mode network is recruited when healthy subjects deliberate about 'personal' moral dilemmas, but patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia producing atrophy in the salience network give abnormally utilitarian responses to these dilemmas. Second, patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia have reduced recruitment of the default mode network compared with healthy control subjects when deliberating about these dilemmas. Third, a Granger causality analysis of functional neuroimaging data from healthy control subjects demonstrates directed functional connectivity from nodes of the salience network to nodes of the default mode network during moral reasoning. Fourth, this Granger causal influence is diminished in patients with behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia. These findings are consistent with a broader model in which the salience network modulates the activity of other large-scale networks, and suggest a revision to a previously proposed 'dual-process' account of moral reasoning. These findings also characterize network interactions underlying abnormal moral reasoning in frontotemporal dementia, which may serve as a model for the aberrant judgement and interpersonal behaviour observed in this disease and in other disorders of social function. More broadly, these findings link recent work on the dynamic interrelationships between large-scale brain networks to observable impairments in dementia syndromes, which may shed light on how diseases that target one network also alter the function of interrelated networks.
| S-EPMC3673466 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Going back to Kohlberg, moral development research affirms that people progress through different stages of moral reasoning as cognitive abilities mature. Individuals at a lower level of moral reasoning judge moral issues mainly based on self-interest (personal interests schema) or based on adherence to laws and rules (maintaining norms schema), whereas individuals at the post-conventional level judge moral issues based on deeper principles and shared ideals. However, the extent to which moral development is reflected in structural brain architecture remains unknown. To investigate this question, we used voxel-based morphometry and examined the brain structure in a sample of 67 Master of Business Administration (MBA) students. Subjects completed the Defining Issues Test (DIT-2) which measures moral development in terms of cognitive schema preference. Results demonstrate that subjects at the post-conventional level of moral reasoning were characterized by increased gray matter volume in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, compared with subjects at a lower level of moral reasoning. Our findings support an important role for both cognitive and emotional processes in moral reasoning and provide first evidence for individual differences in brain structure according to the stages of moral reasoning first proposed by Kohlberg decades ago.
| S-EPMC4454660 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionPersons with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) can exhibit apparently antisocial behaviors. An example is their tendency to adopt utilitarian choices in sacrificial moral dilemmas, i.e. harmful actions to promote overall welfare. Moral cognition models interpret such tendencies as deriving from a lack of emotional engagement and selective impairment in prosocial sentiments.MethodsWe applied a qualitative approach to test those theoretical assumptions and to further explore the emotional experiences and values of people with bvFTD while they contemplate moral scenarios. We conducted semistructured interviews with 14 participants: 7 persons with bvFTD and 7 older healthy controls. Transcripts were coded using ATLAS.ti 5.0.ResultsDuring the moral reasoning task, persons with bvFTD reported more positive emotions than negative and showed significantly less cognitive precision in their moral reasoning compared to controls. Persons with bvFTD also organized their choices predominantly around kindness and altruism, and their responses reflected higher rule compliance. Our study showed that bvFTD persons' utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas did not arise from an emotionally disengaged or antisocial perspective. Instead, they were underpinned by positive emotionality and prosocial values.DiscussionThese findings enrich current understandings of moral cognition and highlight the importance of incorporating mixed methods approaches in dementia research that take into consideration the viewpoint of cognitively impaired individuals.
| S-EPMC10365271 | biostudies-literature