Asking ‘why?’ enhances theory of mind when evaluating harm but not purity violations

Abstract

Recent work in psychology and neuroscience has revealed important differences in the cognitive processes underlying judgments of harm and purity violations. In particular, research has demonstrated that whether a violation was committed intentionally vs accidentally has a larger impact on moral judgments of harm violations (e.g. assault) than purity violations (e.g. incest). Here, we manipulate the instructions provided to participants for a moral judgment task to further probe the boundary conditions of this intent effect. Specifically, we instructed participants undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging to attend to either a violator’s mental states (why they acted that way) or their low-level behavior (how they acted) before delivering moral judgments. Results revealed that task instructions enhanced rather than diminished differences between how harm and purity violations are processed in brain regions for mental state reasoning or theory of mind. In particular, activity in the right temporoparietal junction increased when participants were instructed to attend to why vs how a violator acted to a greater extent for harm than for purity violations. This result constrains the potential accounts of why intentions matter less for purity violations compared to harm violations and provide further insight into the differences between distinct moral norms.

Theory of Mind Following the Violation of Strong and Weak Prior Beliefs

“…ROIs were defined as all voxels within a 9-mm radius of the peak voxel that passed threshold in the contrast "false belief > false photo" (P < 0.001, uncorrected; k > 16, computed via 1000 iterations of a Monte-Carlo simulation, Slotnick et al 2003). We used the same ROI selection parameters as previous neuroimaging research examining ToM regions (Tsoi et al 2018;Dungan and Young 2019). See Supplementary Table 1 for peak coordinates and Supplementary Fig.…”

The affective harm account (AHA) of moral judgment: Reconciling cognition and affect, dyadic morality and disgust, harm and purity.

“…If separate moral "foundations" do not exist (see also Schein & Gray, 2018), what are we to make of the many studies revealing correlations between interesting phenomena and measurements of fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity (Dungan & Young, 2019;Graham et al, 2009Graham et al, , 2016Graham & Haidt, 2010)? The answer is to pivot our understanding of "foundations" away from the modules of evolutionary psychology and back to the "themes of ethical discourse" of anthropology (Shweder et al, 1997).…”

Effects of Core Disgust and Moral Disgust on Moral Judgment: An Event-Related Potential Study

“…Previous behavioral studies showed that people tend to make more strictly moral judgments in the non-purity domain and judge the purity domain to be more moral ( Landy and Goodwin, 2015 ; Olatunji et al, 2016 ). The imaging and electrophysiological studies also showed that the processing of purity-based moral judgment was different from that in other domains ( Dungan and Young, 2019 ; Jiang et al, 2020 ). So far, numerous empirical studies have formed two competing hypotheses ( Wagemans et al, 2018 ).…”