Brain
scans link concern for justice with reason, not emotion
People who
care about justice are swayed more by reason than emotion. That is the
unexpected finding of new brain scan research from the University of Chicago
department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience.
Psychologists have found that some individuals react more strongly than others
to situations that invoke a sense of justice — for example, seeing a person
being treated unfairly, or with mercy. The new study used brain scans to
analyze the thought processes of people with high “justice sensitivity.”
Using a functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain-scanning device, the team studied what
happened in the participants’ brains as they judged videos depicting behavior
that was morally good or bad. For example, they saw a person put money in a
beggar’s cup or kick the beggar’s cup away.
The participants were asked to rate
on a scale how much they would blame or praise the actor seen in the video.
People in the study also completed questionnaires that assessed cognitive and
emotional empathy, as well as their justice sensitivity.
As expected, study
participants who scored high on the justice sensitivity questionnaire assigned
significantly more blame when they were evaluating scenes of harm, Decety said.
They also registered more praise for scenes showing a person helping another
individual.
But the brain imaging
also yielded surprises. During the behavior-evaluation exercise, people with
high justice sensitivity showed more activity than average participants in parts
of the brain associated with higher-order cognition. Brain areas commonly
linked with emotional processing were not affected.
The conclusion was
clear, Decety said: “Individuals who are sensitive to justice and fairness do
not seem to be emotionally driven. Rather, they are cognitively driven.”
According to Decety,
one implication is that the search for justice and the moral missions of human
rights organizations and others do not come primarily from sentimental
motivations, as they are often portrayed. Instead, that drive may have more to
do with sophisticated analysis and mental calculation.
Decety adds that
evaluating good actions elicited relatively high activity in the region of the
brain involved in decision-making, motivation and rewards. This finding
suggests that perhaps individuals make judgments about behavior based on how
they process the reward value of good actions as compared to bad actions.
“Our results provide
some of the first evidence for the role of justice sensitivity in enhancing
neural processing of moral information in specific components of the brain
network involved in moral judgment,” Decety said.
UChicago Psychology
doctoral student Keith Yoder is a co-author on the paper, which was published
in the March 19 issue of The
Journal of Neuroscience.
Story Source:
The above story is
based on materials provided by University of Chicago. Note: Materials may be edited for content
and length.
Journal
Reference:
1.
K. J. Yoder, J. Decety. The
Good, the Bad, and the Just: Justice Sensitivity Predicts Neural Response
during Moral Evaluation of Actions Performed by Others. Journal of Neuroscience,
2014; 34 (12): 4161 DOI:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4648-13.2014
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