The Dark Side of Morality - Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for Violence.

AJOB Neuroscience
Clifford I WorkmanJean Decety

Abstract

People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitical violence, and determining the extent to which the engagement of these mechanisms was predicted by moral convictions. Participants reported their moral convictions about a variety of sociopolitical issues prior to undergoing functional MRI scanning. During scanning, they were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of violent protests that were ostensibly congruent or incongruent with their views about sociopolitical issues. Complementary univariate and multivariate analytical strategies comparing neural responses to congruent and incongruent violence identified neural mechanisms implicated in processing salience and in the encoding of subjective value. As predicted, neuro-hemodynamic response was modulated parametrically by individuals' beliefs about the appropriateness of congruent relative to incongruent sociopolitical violence in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and by moral convic...Continue Reading

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Citations

Feb 11, 2021·Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences·Clifford I WorkmanAnjan Chatterjee
Nov 17, 2020·AJOB Neuroscience·Walter Veit, Heather Browning
Nov 17, 2020·AJOB Neuroscience·Kit RempalaSydney Samoska
Nov 17, 2020·AJOB Neuroscience·Gillian E Hue
Nov 17, 2020·AJOB Neuroscience·Andrea Lavazza
Nov 17, 2020·AJOB Neuroscience·Arie W Kruglanski, Molly Ellenberg

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SPM12
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MATLAB
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MarsBaR
3dClustSim

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