Cognitive And Neural Mechanisms Of Moral Judgment In Different Social Contexts

Moral judgment is the process by which an individual,when faced with a situation involving moral issues,morally evaluates his or her own or others’ behavior according to moral principles.Moral judgment itself has strong social attributes.Most of the previous research on moral dilemmas is based on personal perspective,lacks the exploration of the psychological mechanism of moral decision-making in open situations or situations where multiple people exist.In addition,the traditional moral dilemma paradigm based on the dual-process theory of moral judgment has been questioned by many researchers for its lack of ecological validity and overly absolute division between utilitarianism and deontology.The CNI model provides a detailed distinction of the cognitive processing involved in moral judgment,clarifying whether changes in moral decision-making are caused by sensitivity to consequences,sensitivity to norms,or general inaction/inaction.In recent years,with the development of multi-brain imaging technology,functional near-infrared spectroscopy(f NIRS)hyper scanning technology has provided a new way to study the neural mechanisms of moral judgment in real-life social interaction scenarios.This study conducted four experiments to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms of moral judgment in different social contexts,and the moral dilemma materials in each experiment were compiled based on the CNI model.Experiment 1 used a social observation paradigm,requiring participants to complete a moral judgment task under the surveillance of two independent and unfamiliar observers.The purpose was to examine whether individuals’ moral judgment would be influenced by mere exposure of their decision in the presence of others.The results showed that participants’ moral decision-making was not affected by the presence of observers in the social observation context.In experiment 2,we used a parallel judgment paradigm,which two strangers were asked to judge the same moral dilemma without verbal communication,then publish the judgment results of the two after the judgment of both parties is completed.The purpose was to examine whether individuals’ moral judgments would be influenced by social feedback when they received information about others’ judgments.To better explain the difference between the parallel judgment and social observation paradigms,anxiety levels,perceived stress,and social approval were also measured during the moral judgment task.The results showed that in the parallel judgment context,participants’ low decision acceptance was due to their inaction tendency.Additionally,participants’ judgment confidence was influenced by social pressure and potential social evaluation.In experiment 3,we used a joint judgment paradigm,requiring two unfamiliar participants to make a joint decision about the same dilemma without verbal communication,both pairs were required to reach consensus decisions on each dilemma,while measuring social indicators.The results showed that in the joint judgment situation,the low decision acceptance of the participants was partly due to an increase in sensitivity to moral norms and a more pronounced tendency towards inaction,and they had lower levels of perceived stress and higher levels of social approval.In experiment 4,the hyper-scan technology of f NIRS was used to comprehensively investigate the changes of activation degree of different brain regions and the performance of brain synchronization under the parallel judgment situation and the joint judgment situation.The results showed that there were differences in the neural mechanism of moral decisionmaking in different social situations.Compared with individual judgment,joint judgment caused higher activation of blood oxygen in the left prefrontal lobe and weaker activation in the left temporoparietal joint area.At the same time,there was stronger inter-brain synchronization in the right prefrontal lobe and the left temporoparietal joint area.The results of the four experiments collectively indicate that individuals are more inclined to make unacceptable moral decisions in the presence of others,and this seemingly more moral decision,on the one hand,comes from the increase in the sensitivity of moral norms caused by the desire to obtain higher social approval,on the other hand,is due to the general non-action tendency caused by the dispersion of responsibilities.Analysis of activation with f NIRS supports this conclusion,and the enhanced inter-brain synchronization between the right prefrontal lobe and left temporoparietal joint in the joint decision-making group further confirms that in the social decision-making process of multipearson cooperation,even without verbal communication,there will be mutual brain synchronization between individuals.