Neuroscience of Morality

Readings

Papers for weekly readings

To get started on the bibliography for the final paper, students should choose 6-8 of the assigned and additional readings.

session	reading
1: Introduction	No Readings
2: Empathy and Morality	Bethlehem, Richard AI, Carrie Allison, Emma M. van Andel, Alexander I. Coles, Kimberley Neil, and Simon Baron-Cohen. “Does Empathy Predict Altruism in the Wild?.” Social Neuroscience 12, no. 6 (2017): 743-750. Singer, Tania, and Olga M. Klimecki. “Empathy and Compassion.” Current Biology 24, no. 18 (2014): R875-R878. Ashar, Yoni K., Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, Sona Dimidjian, and Tor D. Wager. “Empathic Care and Distress: Predictive Brain Markers and Dissociable Brain Systems.” Neuron (2017). Bloom, Paul. “Empathy and Its Discontents.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2016).
3: Rodent Models of Empathy	Bartal, Inbal Ben-Ami, Jean Decety, and Peggy Mason. “Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats.” Science 334, no. 6061 (2011): 1427-1430. Sato, Nobuya, Ling Tan, Kazushi Tate, and Maya Okada. “Rats Demonstrate Helping Behavior Toward a Soaked Conspecific.” Animal Cognition 18, no. 5 (2015): 1039-1047. Burkett, James P., Elissar Andari, Zachary V. Johnson, Daniel C. Curry, Frans BM de Waal, and Larry J. Young. “Oxytocin-Dependent Consolation Behavior in Rodents.” Science 351, no. 6271 (2016): 375-378. Bartz, Jennifer A., Jamil Zaki, Niall Bolger, Eric Hollander, Natasha N. Ludwig, Alexander Kolevzon, and Kevin N. Ochsner. “Oxytocin Selectively Improves Empathic Accuracy.” Psychological Science 21, no. 10 (2010): 1426-1428. Insel, Thomas R. “Translating Oxytocin Neuroscience to the Clinic: a National Institute of Mental Health Perspective.” Biological Psychiatry 79, no. 3 (2016): 153-154.
4: Origins of Empathy and Prosociality	Davidov, Maayan, Carolyn Zahn‐Waxler, Ronit Roth‐Hanania, and Ariel Knafo. “Concern for Others in the First Year of Life: Theory, Evidence, and Avenues for Research.” Child Development Perspectives 7, no. 2 (2013): 126-131. Grossmann, Tobias. “How to Build a Helpful Baby: A Look at the Roots of Prosociality in Infancy.” Current Opinion in Psychology 20 (2018): 21-24. Knafo-Noam, Ariel, Dana Vertsberger, and Salomon Israel. “Genetic and Environmental Contributions to Children’s Prosocial Behavior: Brief Review and New Evidence from a Reanalysis of Experimental Twin Data.” Current Opinion in Psychology 20 (2018): 60-65. Van de Vondervoort, Julia W., and Jane Kiley Hamlin. “The Early Emergence of Sociomoral Evaluation: Infants Prefer Prosocial Others.” Current Opinion in Psychology 20 (2018): 77-81. Dahl, Audun. “How, Not Whether: Contributions of Others in the Development of Infant Helping.” Current Opinion in Psychology 20 (2018): 72-76.
5: Psychopath and the Moral Brain	Blair, R. James R. “The Amygdala and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Morality and Psychopathy.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11, no. 9 (2007): 387-392. Shenhav, Amitai, and Joshua D. Greene. “Integrative Moral Judgment: Dissociating the Roles of the Amygdala and Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex.” Journal of Neuroscience 34, no. 13 (2014): 4741-4749. Marsh, A. A., & Cardinale, E. M. “When Psychopathy Impairs Moral Judgments: Neural Responses During Judgments About Causing Fear.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(1), (2012): 3-11. Motzkin, Julian C., Joseph P. Newman, Kent A. Kiehl, and Michael Koenigs. “Reduced Prefrontal Connectivity in Psychopathy.” Journal of Neuroscience 31, no. 48 (2011): 17348-17357.
6: Essay Workshop	No Readings
7: Action Aversion	Costa, Albert, Alice Foucart, Sayuri Hayakawa, Melina Aparici, Jose Apesteguia, Joy Heafner, and Boaz Keysar. “Your Morals Depend on Language.” PLOS ONE 9, no. 4 (2014): e94842. Cushman, Fiery, Kurt Gray, Allison Gaffey, and Wendy Berry Mendes. “Simulating Murder: The Aversion to Harmful Action.” Emotion 12, no. 1 (2012): 2. Miller, Ryan M., Ivar A. Hannikainen, and Fiery A. Cushman. “Bad Actions or Bad Outcomes? Differentiating Affective Contributions to the Moral Condemnation of Harm.” Emotion 14, no. 3 (2014): 573.
8: Learning, Change, Plasticity	Taber-Thomas, Bradley C., Erik W. Asp, Michael Koenigs, Matthew Sutterer, Steven W. Anderson, and Daniel Tranel. “Arrested Development: Early Prefrontal Lesions Impair the Maturation of Moral Judgement.” Brain 137, no. 4 (2014): 1254-1261. Burns, Jeffrey M., and Russell H. Swerdlow. “Right Orbitofrontal Tumor with Pedophilia Symptom and Constructional Apraxia Sign.” Archives of Neurology 60, no. 3 (2003): 437-440. Rosas, Alejandro, and Michael Koenigs. “Beyond “Utilitarianism”: Maximizing the Clinical Impact of Moral Judgment Research.” Social Neuroscience 9, no. 6 (2014): 661-667. Cushman, Fiery. “The Neural Basis of Morality: Not Just Where, but When.” Brain 137, no. 4 (2014): 974-975.
9: Parochialism and the Moral Circle	Mathur, Vani A., Tokiko Harada, Trixie Lipke, and Joan Y. Chiao. “Neural Basis of Extraordinary Empathy and Altruistic Motivation.” Neuroimage 51, no. 4 (2010): 1468-1475. De Dreu, Carsten KW, Lindred L. Greer, Gerben A. Van Kleef, Shaul Shalvi, and Michel JJ Handgraaf. “Oxytocin Promotes Human Ethnocentrism.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 4 (2011): 1262-1266. Cikara, Mina, Rachel A. Farnsworth, Lasana T. Harris, and Susan T. Fiske. “On the Wrong Side of the Trolley Track: Neural Correlates of Relative Social Valuation.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 5, no. 4 (2010): 404-413. Waytz, Adam, Ravi Iyer, Liane Young, and Jesse Graham. “Ideological Differences in the Expanse of Empathy.” Social Psychology of Political Polarization (2016): 61.
10: Celebrating Intergroup Violence	Cikara, Mina. “Intergroup Schadenfreude: Motivating Participation in Collective Violence.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 3 (2015): 12-17. Cikara, Mina, Matthew M. Botvinick, and Susan T. Fiske. “Us Versus Them: Social Identity Shapes Neural Responses to Intergroup Competition and Harm.” Psychological Science 22, no. 3 (2011): 306-313. Rai, Tage S., Piercarlo Valdesolo, and Jesse Graham. “Dehumanization Increases Instrumental Violence, but Not Noral Violence.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2017): 201705238. Ginges, Jeremy, Scott Atran, Sonya Sachdeva, and Douglas Medin. “Psychology Out of the Laboratory: The Challenge of Violent Extremism.” American Psychologist 66, no. 6 (2011): 507. Fischer, Peter, S. Alexander Haslam, and Laura Smith. ““If You Wrong Us, Shall We Not Revenge?” Social Identity Salience Moderates Support for Retaliation in Response to Collective Threat.” Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 14, no. 2 (2010): 143.
11: Guilty Minds	Young, Liane, Joan Albert Camprodon, Marc Hauser, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, and Rebecca Saxe. “Disruption of the Right Temporoparietal Junction with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Reduces the Role of Beliefs in Moral Judgments.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107, no. 15 (2010): 6753-6758. Fehse, Kai, Sarita Silveira, Katrin Elvers, and Janusch Blautzik. “Compassion, Guilt and Innocence: An fMRI Study of Responses to Victims Who are Responsible for Their Fate.” Social Neuroscience 10, no. 3 (2015): 243-252. Treadway, Michael T., Joshua W. Buckholtz, Justin W. Martin, Katharine Jan, Christopher L. Asplund, Matthew R. Ginther, Owen D. Jones, and René Marois. “Corticolimbic Gating of Emotion-Driven Punishment.” Nature Neuroscience 17, no. 9 (2014): 1270-1275.
12: Essay Workshop	No readings
13: Moral Variability	Graham, Jesse, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek. “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96, no. 5 (2009): 1029. Barrett, H. Clark, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Daniel MT Fessler, Simon Fitzpatrick, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich et al. “Small-Scale Societies Exhibit Fundamental Variation in the Role of Intentions in Moral Judgment.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 17 (2016): 4688-4693. Henrich, Joseph, Richard McElreath, Abigail Barr, Jean Ensminger, Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Juan Camilo Cardenas et al. “Costly Punishment Across Human Societies.” Science 312, no. 5781 (2006): 1767-1770. Chakroff, Alek, James Dungan, Jorie Koster-Hale, Amelia Brown, Rebecca Saxe, and Liane Young. “When Minds Matter for Moral Judgment: Intent Information is Neurally Encoded for Harmful but Not Impure Acts.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 11, no. 3 (2015): 476-484. Hofmann, Wilhelm, Daniel C. Wisneski, Mark J. Brandt, and Linda J. Skitka. “Morality in Everyday Life.” Science 345, no. 6202 (2014): 1340-1343.
14: The Good Self	Haslam, S. Alexander, Stephen D. Reicher, and Megan E. Birney. “Questioning Authority: New Perspectives on Milgram’s Oobedience’ Research and its Implications for Intergroup Relations.” Current Opinion in Psychology 11 (2016): 6-9. Mazar, Nina, On Amir, and Dan Ariely. “The Dishonesty of Honest People: A Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance.” Journal of Marketing Research 45, no. 6 (2008): 633-644. Gino, Francesca, Michael I. Norton, and Roberto A. Weber. “Motivated Bayesians: Feeling Moral While Acting Egoistically.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 30, no. 3 (2016): 189-212. D’Argembeau, Arnaud, Haroun Jedidi, Evelyne Balteau, Mohamed Bahri, Christophe Phillips, and Eric Salmon. “Valuing One’s Self: Medial Prefrontal Involvement in Epistemic and Emotive Investments in Self-Views.” Cerebral Cortex 22, no. 3 (2011): 659-667.
15: Science and Morality	No readings

Additional Readings

Anderson, Steven W., Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Antonio R. Damasio. “Impairment of Social and Moral Behavior Related to Early Damage in Human Prefrontal Cortex.” Nature neuroscience 2, no. 11 (1999): 1032-1037.

Alexander, Marcus, and Fotini Christia. “Context Modularity of Human Altruism.” Science 334, no. 6061 (2011): 1392-1394.

Barrett, H. Clark, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Daniel MT Fessler, Simon Fitzpatrick, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich et al. “Small-Scale Societies Exhibit Fundamental Variation in the Role of Intentions in Moral Judgment.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 17 (2016): 4688-4693.

Bartal, Inbal Ben-Ami, David A. Rodgers, Maria Sol Bernardez Sarria, Jean Decety, and Peggy Mason. “Pro-Social Behavior in Rats is Modulated by Social Experience.” Elife 3 (2014): e01385.

Bowles, Samuel. “Policies Designed for Self-Interested Citizens May Undermine the Moral Sentiments: Evidence from Economic Experiments.” Science 320, no. 5883 (2008): 1605-1609.

Bryan, Christopher J., Gabrielle S. Adams, and Benoît Monin. “When Cheating Would Make You a Cheater: Implicating The Self Prevents Unethical Behavior.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 142, no. 4 (2013): 1001.

Buckholtz, Joshua W., Justin W. Martin, Michael T. Treadway, Katherine Jan, David H. Zald, Owen Jones, and Rene Marois. “From Blame to Punishment: Disrupting Prefrontal Cortex Activity Reveals Norm Enforcement Mechanisms.” Neuron 87, no. 6 (2015): 1369-1380.

Castano, Emanuele, and Roger Giner-Sorolla. “Not Quite Human: Infrahumanization in Response to Collective Responsibility for Intergroup Killing.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90, no. 5 (2006): 804.

Cikara, Mina, Emile Bruneau, J. J. Van Bavel, and Rebecca Saxe. “Their Pain Gives Us Pleasure: How Intergroup Dynamics Shape Empathic Failures and Counter-Empathic Responses.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 55 (2014): 110-125.

Cikara, Mina, Adrianna C. Jenkins, Nick Dufour, and Rebecca Saxe. “Reduced Self-Referential Neural Response During Intergroup Competition Predicts Competitor Harm.” NeuroImage 96 (2014): 36-43.

Crockett, Molly J. “Models of Morality.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17, no. 8 (2013): 363-366.

Cushman, Fiery. “From Moral Concern to Moral Constraint.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 3 (2015): 58-62.

Decety, Jean, Laurie R. Skelly, and Kent A. Kiehl. “Brain Response to Empathy-Eliciting Scenarios Involving Pain in Incarcerated Individuals with Psychopathy.” JAMA Psychiatry 70, no. 6 (2013): 638-645.

Ditzen, Beate, Marcel Schaer, Barbara Gabriel, Guy Bodenmann, Ulrike Ehlert, and Markus Heinrichs. “Intranasal Oxytocin Increases Positive Communication and Reduces Cortisol Levels During Couple Conflict.” Biological Psychiatry 65, no. 9 (2009): 728-731.

Feldman, Ruth. “The Neurobiology of Human Attachments.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2016).

FeldmanHall, Oriel, Peter Sokol-Hessner, Jay J. Van Bavel, and Elizabeth A. Phelps. “Fairness Violations Elicit Greater Punishment on Behalf of Another Than for Oneself.” Nature Communications 5 (2014): 5306.

Fourie, Melike M., Dan J. Stein, Mark Solms, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and Jean Decety. “Empathy and Moral Emotions in Post-Apartheid South Africa: An fMRI Investigation.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 12, no. 6 (2017): 881-892.

Ginges, Jeremy, and Scott Atran. “War as a Moral Imperative (Not Just Practical Politics by Other Means).” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 278, no. 1720 (2011): 2930-2938.

Gino, Francesca, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Nicole L. Mead, and Dan Ariely. “Unable to Resist Temptation: How Self-Control Depletion Promotes Unethical Behavior.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 115, no. 2 (2011): 191-203.

Greene, Joshua D., and Joseph M. Paxton. “Patterns of Neural Activity Associated with Honest and Dishonest Moral Decisions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106, no. 30 (2009): 12506-12511.

Greene, Joshua D. “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Moral Judgment.” The Cognitive Neurosciences 4 (2009): 1-48.

Hamlin, J. Kiley, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom. “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants.” Nature 450, no. 7169 (2007): 557-559.

Hamlin, J. Kiley. “Moral Judgment and Action in Preverbal Infants and Toddlers: Evidence for an Innate Moral Core.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 22, no. 3 (2013): 186-193.

Harris, Lasana T., and Susan T. Fiske. “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuroimaging Responses to Extreme Out-Groups.” Psychological Science 17, no. 10 (2006): 847-853.

Haslam, S. Alexander, Stephen D. Reicher, Kathryn Millard, and Rachel McDonald. “‘Happy to Have Been of Service’: The Yale Archive as a Window Into the Engaged Followership of Participants in Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ Experiments.” British Journal of Social Psychology 54, no. 1 (2015): 55-83.

Hauser, Marc, Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, R. Kang‐Xing Jin, and John Mikhail. “A Dissociation Between Moral Judgments and Justifications.” Mind and Language 22, no. 1 (2007): 1-21.

Henrich, Joseph, Richard Mcelreath, Abigail Barr, Jean Ensminger, Clark Barrett, Er Bolyanatz, Juan Camilo Cardenas, Michael Gurven, and Edwins Gwako. “Costly Punishment Across Human Societies.” Science 312:1767-1770s

Hofmann, Wilhelm, Daniel C. Wisneski, Mark J. Brandt, and Linda J. Skitka. “Morality In Everyday Life.” Science 345, no. 6202 (2014): 1340-1343.

Hurlemann, René, Alexandra Patin, Oezguer A. Onur, Michael X. Cohen, Tobias Baumgartner, Sarah Metzler, Isabel Dziobek et al. “Oxytocin Enhances Amygdala-Dependent, Socially Reinforced Learning and Emotional Empathy in Humans.” Journal of Neuroscience 30, no. 14 (2010): 4999-5007.

Israel, Salomon, Liat Hasenfratz, and Ariel Knafo-Noam. “The Genetics of Morality and Prosociality.” Current Opinion in Psychology 6 (2015): 55-59.

Kelly, Daniel, Stephen Stich, Kevin J. Haley, Serena J. Eng, and Daniel MT Fessler. “Harm, Affect, and the Moral/Conventional Distinction.” Mind & Language 22, no. 2 (2007): 117-131.

Knafo, Ariel, and Robert Plomin. “Prosocial Behavior from Early to Middle Childhood: Genetic and Environmental Influences on Stability and Change.” Developmental Psychology 42, no. 5 (2006): 771.

Koster-Hale, Jorie, Rebecca Saxe, James Dungan, and Liane L. Young. “Decoding Moral Judgments from Neural Representations of Intentions.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 14 (2013): 5648-5653.

Krueger, Frank, and Morris Hoffman. “The Emerging Neuroscience of Third-Party Punishment.” Trends in Neurosciences 39, no. 8 (2016): 499-501.

Krueger, Frank, Raja Parasuraman, Lara Moody, Peter Twieg, Ewart de Visser, Kevin McCabe, Martin O’Hara, and Mary R. Lee. “Oxytocin Selectively Increases Perceptions of Harm for Victims but Not the Desire to Punish Offenders of Criminal Offenses.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 8, no. 5 (2012): 494-498.

Levitt, Steven D., and John A. List. “What do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal About the Real World?.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 21, no. 2 (2007): 153-174.

Liberman, Varda, Steven M. Samuels, and Lee Ross. “The Name of the Game: Predictive Power of Reputations Versus Situational Labels in Determining Prisoner’s Dilemma Game Moves.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30, no. 9 (2004): 1175-1185.

Monin, Benoit, and Dale T. Miller. “Moral Credentials and the Expression of Prejudice.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81, no. 1 (2001): 33.

Moretto, Giovanna, Elisabetta Làdavas, Flavia Mattioli, and Giuseppe Di Pellegrino. “A Psychophysiological Investigation of Moral Judgment After Ventromedial Prefrontal Damage.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 22, no. 8 (2010): 1888-1899.

Nook, Erik C., Desmond C. Ong, Sylvia A. Morelli, Jason P. Mitchell, and Jamil Zaki. “Prosocial Conformity: Prosocial Norms Generalize Across Behavior and Empathy.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 42, no. 8 (2016): 1045-1062.

Patil, Indrajeet. “Trait Psychopathy and Utilitarian Moral Judgement: The Mediating Role of Action Aversion.” Journal of Cognitive Psychology 27, no. 3 (2015): 349-366.

Poldrack, Russell A. “Can Cognitive Processes be Inferred from Neuroimaging Data?.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10, no. 2 (2006): 59-63.

Mather, Mara, John T. Cacioppo, and Nancy Kanwisher. “How fMRI Can Inform Cognitive Theories.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 8, no. 1 (2013): 108-113.

Preston, Stephanie D. “The Origins of Altruism in Offspring Care.” Psychological Bulletin 139, no. 6 (2013): 1305.

Riedl, Katrin, Keith Jensen, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello. “No Third-Party Punishment in Chimpanzees.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 37 (2012): 14824-14829.

Saxe, Rebecca. “Moral Status of Accidents.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 17 (2016): 4555-4557.

Sheskin, Mark, and Laurie Santos. “The Evolution of Morality: Which Aspects of Human Moral Concerns are Shared with Nonhuman Primates.” The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Evolutionary Psychology 13 (2012).

Skitka, Linda J. “The Psychology of Moral Conviction.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4, no. 4 (2010): 267-281.

Strobel, Alexander, Jan Zimmermann, Anja Schmitz, Martin Reuter, Stefanie Lis, Sabine Windmann, and Peter Kirsch. “Beyond Revenge: Neural and Genetic Bases of Altruistic Punishment.” Neuroimage 54, no. 1 (2011): 671-680.

Tetlock, Philip E. “Thinking the Unthinkable: Sacred Values and Taboo Cognitions.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7, no. 7 (2003): 320-324.

Tomasello, Michael. “The Ultra‐Social Animal.” European Journal of Social Psychology 44, no. 3 (2014): 187-194.

Young, Liane, and James Dungan. “Where in the Brain is Morality? Everywhere and Maybe Nowhere.” Social Neuroscience 7, no. 1 (2012): 1-10.

Zaki, Jamil, and Jason P. Mitchell. “Equitable Decision Making is Associated with Neural Markers of Intrinsic Value.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108, no. 49 (2011): 19761-19766.