Moral psychology
How fast does the brain combine intentions and outcomes in moral judgment?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People weigh intentions heavily when judging harm, and brain responses separate successful from attempted acts in stages within the first second.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Two within-subject EEG/ERP experiments crossing intention (valenced vs neutral) with outcome (valenced vs neutral) in harm and help stories
- N
- N=55 · 55 students total: 27 in Experiment 1 (harm) and 28 in Experiment 2 (help)
- Population
- Right-handed undergraduates at Beijing Normal University
- Outcome
- Permissibility (harm) or praise (help) ratings, reaction times, and ERP amplitudes over frontal and temporo-parietal sites
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Key findings
For harm, negative intentions and negative outcomes both made acts less permissible, and they interacted: accidental harm was judged much worse than no harm, more than successful was compared with attempted harm. For help, intention and outcome each raised praise but did not interact. In both experiments an early component around 180 ms over right temporo-parietal sites was larger for successful than attempted acts, a component near 250 ms over the left side was larger for attempted acts, and later frontal and temporo-parietal waves also separated attempted from successful acts.
Methodology
Students read short stories in which an agent intended to cause harm (or help) or not, and did or did not produce that outcome, giving four conditions: none, accidental, attempted and successful. One group judged how permissible harmful acts were; a separate group judged how much praise helpful acts deserved. EEG was recorded time-locked to the key word revealing the agent's intention.
Limitations
The samples were small (under 30 per experiment) and the harm and help experiments used different people and different questions (permissibility versus praise), so the harm-help asymmetry could reflect the task rather than valence. ERPs have poor spatial resolution, so linking the effects to the temporo-parietal junction is an inference, not a measurement. The authors note that some harm stories hinted at the agent's intention before the keyword appeared, and that encoding intention and integrating it with outcome were not cleanly separated in time.
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