What makes our decisions morally just or objectionable? It is the brain activity that is responsible for the differences in our moral behaviour, reveals a new study.
“Our study demonstrates that with moral behaviour,people may not in fact always stick to the golden rule. While most people tendto exhibit some concern for others, some others may demonstrate ‘moralopportunism’, where they want to look moral but want to maximize their ownbenefit,” said lead author Jeroen van Baar, a postdoctoral researchassociate at Brown University, US.
For the study, published in Nature Communications journal,researchers developed a computational strategy model to examine the brainactivity patterns linked to the moral strategies.
The team tried to determine which type of moral strategy theparticipant was using — inequity aversion (where people reciprocate becausethey want to seek fairness in outcomes); guilt aversion (where peoplereciprocate because they want to avoid feeling guilty); greed or moralopportunism (where people switch between inequity aversion and guilt aversiondepending on what will serve their interests best).
The study showed that people used different moral principlesto make their decisions and also changed their moral behaviour depending on thesituation.
“In everyday life, we may not notice that our moralsare context-dependent since our contexts tend to stay the same daily. However,under new circumstances, we may find that the moral rules we thought we’dalways follow are actually quite malleable,” said co-author Luke J. Chang,Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College, US.
“This has tremendous ramifications if one considers howour moral behaviour could change under new contexts, such as during war,”he added.
The study’s findings revealed that “uniquepatterns” of brain activity underlie the inequity aversion and guiltaversion strategies.
“Our results demonstrate that people may use differentmoral principles to make their decisions, and that some people are much moreflexible and will apply different principles depending on the situation,”said Chang.
“This may explain why people that we like and respectoccasionally do things that we find morally objectionable,” he added.