Egocentric, thief and/or murderer: damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex interferes with normal social and moral functioning, but when?

Would you put false information on your resume in order to help yourself find employment? Would you pretend that certain personal expenses are business expenses in order to lower your taxes? Would you push your boss off of the building in order to get him out of your life? Would you employ your daughter in the child pornography industry in order to feed your family? Would you kill your oldest son in order to save your husband and your other three children? Studies in the last two decades aiming to elicit the neural and cognitive mechanisms that underlie human moral behavior have disclosed the importance of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) in pathophysiological conditions. Individuals that have localized brain damage at PFC produced by stroke, trauma or neurological disease have been shown to present high levels of aggressiveness, and egocentric and impulsive antisocial behaviour. The results of an interesting study that © 2008 Warner Bros. Entertainment.