The central question of Churchland’s book Braintrust is where do moral values come from? She answers it in terms of the latest research in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, and genetics. By explaining and understanding our social practices via scientific research Churchland tries to provide a neurobiological platform for morality and thus illuminates the usually negle...

Recent studies indicate that emotional processes, mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), are of great importance for moral judgment. Neurological patients with VMPC dysfunction have been shown to generate increased utilitarian moral judgments, i.e. are more likely to endorse emotionally aversive actions in order to maximize aggregate welfare, when faced with emotionally salient ...

Recent theorizing in moral psychology extends rationalist models by calling attention to social and cultural influences (J. Haidt, 2001). Six studies using adolescents, university students, and adults measured the associations among the self-importance of moral identity, moral cognitions, and behavior. The psychometric properties of the measure were assessed through an examination of the underl...

Studied the relationship between social motivation and approaches to moral decision making, and also the emotions people experience in real life moral dilemmas. 44 students were interviewed about a moral dilemma that they had faced in the past. Social motivation was measured with Emmons’ (1989) idiographic personal strivings method. Intimacy motivation was related to a preference for making dec...

Recent research has begun to elucidate the neural basis of higher order social concepts, such as the mechanisms involved in intergroup relations, and moral judgments. Most theories have concentrated on higher order emotions, such as guilt, shame, or empathy, as core mechanisms. Accordingly, psychopharmacological and neurobiological studies have investigated the effects of manipulating serotonin...

Morality and cultural identity emerge during human development in complex ways. We describe the theories and findings that focus on social exclusion and inclusion, social inequalities such as resource allocation inequalities, and intercultural contexts that both bear on and contribute to morality and moral development. This research reveals that individuals view morality as pertaining to fair, ...

This paper seeks to analyze the influence of consumers’ moral intensity, perceived risks and moral judgment in purchasing pirated software by using the issue-risk judgment (IRJ) model. Moral intensity includes magnitude of consequence, social consensus, probability of effect and temporal immediacy; perceived risks of consumers include financial, performance, prosecution and social risks; and mo...

Reading daily newspaper articles often evokes opinions and social judgments about the characters and stories. Social and moral judgments rely on the proper functioning of neural circuits concerned with complex cognitive and emotional processes. To examine whether dissociable neural systems mediate emotionally charged moral and nonmoral social judgments, we used a visual sentence verification ta...

Which social norms and networks maximize cooperation in bilateral relationships? We study a network of players in which each link is a repeated bilateral partnership with two-sided moral hazard. The obstacle to community enforcement is that each player observes the behavior of her partners in their partnerships with her, but not how they behave in other partnerships. We introduce a new metric f...

Citizens’ desires to assist the poor reflect a mixture of insurance motives, altruism, and paternalism. Consequently, government policies toward the poor have always been a mixture of income supports and regulations of recipient behavior. Unfortunately, there have been very few analyses of the how these distinct motives interact to generate various policies to the poor. In this paper, we develo...