The study of decision making has been dominated by economic perspectives, which model people as rational agents who carefully weigh costs and benefits and try to maximize the utility of every choice, without consideration of issues such as cultural norms, religious beliefs and moral rules. However, psychological findings indicate that in many situations people are not rational decision makers a...

Mental state representations are a crucial input to human moral judgment. This fact is often summarized by saying that we restrict moral condemnation to ‘intentional’ harms. This simple description is the beginning of a theory, however, not the end of one. There is rich internal structure to the folk concept of intentional action, which comprises a series of causal relations between mental stat...

INTRODUCTION The present study aimed at exploring and describing the perception of moral health from middle-aged women standpoints. Women's decisive role in family is undeniable. In the family which is built upon tradition, faith and ethics, this is women's principle which is represented in the moral health of the individual and the society, deals with the nature of the vice and virtue. This st...

Moral judgment depends upon inferences about agents’ beliefs, desires, and intentions. Here, we argue that in addition to these factors, people take into account the moral optimality of an action. Three experiments show that even agents who are ignorant about the nature of their moral decisions are held accountable for the quality of their decision—a kind of behaviorist thinking, in that such r...

When we judge an action as morally right or wrong, we rely on our capacity to infer the actor's mental states (e.g., beliefs, intentions). Here, we test the hypothesis that the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), an area involved in mental state reasoning, is necessary for making moral judgments. In two experiments, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt neural activity i...

People’s beliefs about what is morally right and wrong vary widely between individuals, contexts, and cultures; however it is thought that they are governed by core latent constructs. While there is evidence that these constructs are reflected in natural language, this requires further testing. We demonstrate that the structure of moral values in natural discourse can be modeled by applying fac...

People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were con...

The relation of self-understanding and moral judgment to dedicated prosocial behavior is investigated. Participants were African-American and Latin-American adolescents who had been nominated by community leaders for having demonstrated unusual commitments to care for others or the community (care exemplars). The care exemplars, and matched comparison adolescents, were extensively interviewed o...