Moral judgement Flashcards
What were the early, rationalistic focussed views on moral judgement by Kohlberg?
- developmental stage theory, by which children learn to use deductive reasoning and gain experience by roleplay, acting on the basis of moral rules
What is evidence from lesion studies against the rationalistic view by Kohlberg?
Eslinger + Damasio found that patients with lesioned pfc still knów moral rules but fail to act on them, showing that conscious reasoning of the rules of morality is not enough to act in a moral way.
What is evidence from Haidt against the rationalistic view by Kohlberg (Hint: content of justification)
He found that most of the time, people cannot give a good justification for why or why not they think something is moral, leading Haidt to believe that moral judgement is comprised of intuitions mostly. Rationalization is then only post hoc justification, to support relationships.
Moll 2002 studies the hypothesis that moral emotions are different from other, basic emotions. They hypothesized that OFC shows more activation to moral emotions, because ppl with OFC lesions have preserved basic emotions but show no empathy. Method and results and implications of their study?
picture blocks: neutral, scrambled, interesting, pleasant, unpleasant, moral violation.
Result: OFC activation more to moral violation than all others.
Overlapping activation insula, AMY
OFC might be for detecting interesting socioemotional events, as OFC lesioned patients can still make moral judgements in a lab, where it is explicit
Cushman 2006 investigated 3 different principles people may use during moral judgement. If the results would show that people consistently use certain principles during moral decision making, and are able to report on the use of this principle afterwards, which account of moral judgement does it support?
This would support the rationalist approach, because this means that people judge morality on the basis of certain moral rules (i.e., if the person is harmed by my own direct action, it is immoral to do it). But only if they can report on this afterwards, otherwise, the principles are used unconsciously, resembling intuitions more than reasoning.
What are the 3 principles that Cushman investigated?
Did people use them in their decision making of which options of the dilemmas were moral?
- action vs omission: is not doing something less bad than doing something?
- intention (means to an end) vs side-effect: is the bad consequence of the behaviour used as a means to an end, or is it only a side effect?
- contact
People used all these principles in the expected way.
In the Cushman principle study, were people able to articulate the principle they used when asked to explain why they made the decision? What implications does this result have?
People could easily explain they used to action principle. People could not consciously explain using the intention principle. The contact principle was recalled consciously about 60 percent of times. It undermines the rationalism theory and supports a theory in which explicit and implicit processing both have a role in moral judgement.
Greene and Sommerville 2001 investigated the role of emotions (emotional salience, personal vs impersonal dillemas) in moral judgement. What did they find about how they are different?
In response to personal dilemmas (eg footbridge), there was more activation in emotion areas (PCC, MED FG, and STS) and less activation in WM areas (DLPFC). Incongruent responses to a personal moral dilemma were accompanied with slower RT because there is interference of emotions that needs to be overcome. Impersonal moral dilemmas are more like practical judgement in that they activate DLPFC.
Greene is a dual processing proponent. How did they explain the evolution of 2 different systems?
According to Greene, dilemmas are considered personal when they can be classified by a simple “ me hurt you” structure that primitive minds can understand (from an intending agent - serious bodily harm - to a specific individual). This system would have evolved earlier and work throug emotions. Impersonal moral judgement would have evolved later, when reasoning mechanisms became available.
What is the main gist of the Moll’s interactionist theory, with the concepts of Event Feature Emotion Complexes / Structured Event Complexes
Depending on nature stimuli in the context, either more controlled or more implicit processing regions are activated, but judgement in itself is product of interconnected regions that integrate different aspects. They do this by SEC scripts, linked events of current state + goal -> behaviour -> outcome and longterm consequences. Activated SECs continually update predictions of behaviour. Some SECs are more predictable / basic than others. Uncertain facets of situation will lead to use of more controlled regions.
What results that are seen in patients with vmpfc lesions can be taken as evidence against dual processing theory? And how is it limited?
these patients behave more emotional in an ultimatum game when rejected, but make more utalitarian judgements in general. However, the emotion is ultimatum game is frustration, related to lack of regulation, whereas the utalitarian may come from a lack of empathy.
Koenigs 2007 were among the first to directly test, with VMPFC lesioned patients, if social emotions truly are necessary for certain kinds of moral judgement (causality). Method?
6 patients with overlapping vmpfc lesions compared to healthy controls and brain damaged controls on both personal and impersonal dilemmas.
Hypotheses: vmpfc patients more utalitarian on personal dilemmas than the others, but in impersonal dilemmas and nonmoral judgement their decision making is the same. Confirmed, though only for high conflict personal dilemmas.
Which model of moral judgement did the Koenigs 2007 vmpfc lesion study support?
interactionism, because depending on the content of the dilemma, more or less controlled processing is used in a continuum kind of way.
Shenhav and Greene investigated the roles of amy and vmpfc, and how they interact in moral judgement. There is competition between the types, but how is it resolved? They had two hypotheses about the role of vmpfc. Which? And how did they test this?
VMPFC could 1. help deliver non utalitarian responses
2. integrate controlled processing and emotion to deliver a response
Method: presentation of dilemmas with 3 questions (event related): which feels worse? which has better outcomes? which is better overall?
Shenhav and Greene investigated the roles of amy and vmpfc, and how they interact in moral judgement. What were the findings of their study testing utalitarian judgement, emotional judgement, and integrative judgement?
- VMPFC more active during integrative judgements vs both other types
- AMY and VMPFC more functionally connected during emotional, and least during utalitarian.
- Emotional and utalitarian judgements, when added together, are very predictive of integrative judgements
