Our folk psychology involves the ability to reason about free will. In a series of experiments, we looked at young children’s ability to reason about their own freedom of choice, and contrast this with their ability to reason about situations that constrain it. We asked preschoolers (Range: 4 y; 1 mo. – 5 y; 7 mo.) whether they had the choice to have done otherwise when they did not have the ne...

Aversive emotional reactions to real or imagined social harms infuse moral judgment and motivate prosocial behavior. Here, we show that the neurotransmitter serotonin directly alters both moral judgment and behavior through increasing subjects' aversion to personally harming others. We enhanced serotonin in healthy volunteers with citalopram (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) and contra...

Findings in the field of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience have shed new light on our understanding of the psychological and biological bases of morality. Although a lot of attention has been devoted to understanding the processes that underlie complex moral dilemmas, attempts to represent the way in which individuals generate moral judgments when processing basic harmful actio...

Diverse lines of evidence point to a basic human aversion to physically harming others. First, we demonstrate that unwillingness to endorse harm in a moral dilemma is predicted by individual differences in aversive reactivity, as indexed by peripheral vasoconstriction. Next, we tested the specific factors that elicit the aversive response to harm. Participants performed actions such as discharg...

Diverse lines of evidence point to a basic human aversion to physically harming others. First, we demonstrate that unwillingness to endorse harm in a moral dilemma is predicted by individual differences in aversive reactivity, as indexed by peripheral vasoconstriction. Next, we tested the specific factors that elicit the aversive response to harm. Participants performed actions such as discharg...

Attitude to morality, reflecting cultural norms and values, is considered unique to human social behavior. Resulting moral behavior in a social environment is controlled by a widespread neural network including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which plays an important role in decision making. In the present study we investigate the influence of neurophysiological modulation of DLPFC ...

Moral dilemmas are used to study the situations in which there is a conflict between two moral rules: e.g. is it permissible to kill one person in order to save more people. In standard moral dilemmas the protagonist is a human. However, the recent progress in robotics leads to the question of how artificial cognitive agents should act in situations involving moral dilemmas. Here, we study mora...

Owing to the hemispheric isolation resulting from a severed corpus callosum, research on split-brain patients can help elucidate the brain regions necessary and sufficient for moral judgement. Notably, typically developing adults heavily weight the intentions underlying others' moral actions, placing greater importance on valenced intentions versus outcomes when assigning praise and blame. Prio...

This essay seeks to contribute to work on moral agency of religious women through the creative naming of a dynamic that is emerging in recent scholarship. Drawing on fieldwork in Iran in 2004, I argue that prominent models of agency based on autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy are unable take into account both religious influence on and individual creativity of women's actions. I propose the neo...

Moral condemnation of harmful behavior is influenced by both cognitive and affective processes. However, despite much recent research, the proximate source of affect remains unclear. One obvious contender is empathy; simulating the victim's pain could lead one to judge an action as wrong ("outcome aversion"). An alternative, less obvious source is one's own aversion to performing the action its...