An fMRI Investigation of Spontaneous Mental State Inference for Moral Judgment

By Liane L. Young, Rebecca Saxe. 2009

226 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Human moral judgment depends critically on “theory of mind,” the capacity to represent the mental states of agents. Recent studies suggest that the right TPJ (RTPJ) and, to lesser extent, the left TPJ (LTPJ), the precuneus (PC), and the medial pFC (MPFC) are robustly recruited when participants read explicit statements of an agent's beliefs and then judge the moral status of the agent's action. Real-world interactions, by contrast, often require social partners to infer each other's mental states. The current study uses fMRI to probe the role of these brain regions in supporting spontaneous mental state inference in the service of moral judgment. Participants read descriptions of a protagonist's action and then either (i) “moral” facts about the action's effect on another person or (ii) “nonmoral” facts about the situation. The RTPJ, PC, and MPFC were recruited selectively for moral over nonmoral facts, suggesting that processing moral stimuli elicits spontaneous mental state inference. In a second experiment, participants read the same scenarios, but explicit statements of belief preceded the facts: Protagonists believed their actions would cause harm or not. The response in the RTPJ, PC, and LTPJ was again higher for moral facts but also distinguished between neutral and negative outcomes. Together, the results illuminate two aspects of theory of mind in moral judgment: (1) spontaneous belief inference and (2) stimulus-driven belief integration.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

Theory of Mind: A Neural Prediction Problem (2013, positive): “Among other regions, a brain region posterior to the superior temporal sulcus, in the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), shows a robust responses while thinking about an individual’s beliefs and desires (Saxe and Kanwisher, 2003; Young and Saxe, 2009a; Aichhorn et al., 2009; Perner et al., 2006).”
When Mental States Matter, When They Don't, and What That Means for Morality (2013, background): “…time of integration, the magnitude of response in the RTPJ is correlated with moral judgment; participants with a higher RTPJ response to accidental harms, on average, deliver more forgiveness and less blame for accidents, compared to participants with a lower RTPJ response (Young & Saxe, 2009).”
Decoding moral judgments from neural representations of intentions (2013, background): “, blamed more based on bad outcomes (34, 35)].”
Innocent intentions: a correlation between forgiveness for accidental harm and neural activity. (2009, background): “FMRI findings have indicated that specific brain regions, including especially the RTPJ, support the ability to attribute beliefs to agents in both moral (e.g., Young et al., 2007; Young & Saxe, 2008; Young & Saxe, in press ) and non-moral contexts (e.g., Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003; Perner et al., 2006”
Distinct and overlapping functional zones in the cerebellum defined by resting state functional connectivity. (2010, background): “The inferior parietal cortex has been implicated in executive functions such as attentional orienting (Corbetta et al. 2000; Kincade et al. 2005) and theory of mind (Saxe and Kanwisher 2003; Young and Saxe 2009).”