An fMRI Investigation of Spontaneous Mental State Inference for Moral Judgment
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Human moral judgment depends critically on “theory of mind,” the capacity to represent the mental states of agents. Recent studies suggest that the right TPJ (RTPJ) and, to lesser extent, the left TPJ (LTPJ), the precuneus (PC), and the medial pFC (MPFC) are robustly recruited when participants read explicit statements of an agent's beliefs and then judge the moral status of the agent's action. Real-world interactions, by contrast, often require social partners to infer each other's mental states. The current study uses fMRI to probe the role of these brain regions in supporting spontaneous mental state inference in the service of moral judgment. Participants read descriptions of a protagonist's action and then either (i) “moral” facts about the action's effect on another person or (ii) “nonmoral” facts about the situation. The RTPJ, PC, and MPFC were recruited selectively for moral over nonmoral facts, suggesting that processing moral stimuli elicits spontaneous mental state inference. In a second experiment, participants read the same scenarios, but explicit statements of belief preceded the facts: Protagonists believed their actions would cause harm or not. The response in the RTPJ, PC, and LTPJ was again higher for moral facts but also distinguished between neutral and negative outcomes. Together, the results illuminate two aspects of theory of mind in moral judgment: (1) spontaneous belief inference and (2) stimulus-driven belief integration.
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Activity in the RTPJ while participants make moral judgments about attempted and accidental harms shows the same asymmetry: greater activity for attempted than accidental harms.
“Activity in the RTPJ while participants make moral judgments about attempted and accidental harms shows the same asymmetry: greater activity for attempted than accidental harms (9, 10, 24, 25).”
From Disruption of the right temporoparietal junction with transcranial magnetic stimulation reduces the role of beliefs in moral judgments (2010) · cites this paper as [25]
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The functional brain architecture of human morality
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The Neural Bases of Directed and Spontaneous Mental State Attributions to Group Agents
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Self-citationThe Dual Track Theory of Moral Decision-Making: a Critique of the Neuroimaging Evidence
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The Psychology of Motivated versus Rational Impression Updating
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Self-citationAn fMRI investigation of the effects of belief in free will on third-party punishment
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Alexithymia increases moral acceptability of accidental harms
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Punishment is Organized around Principles of Communicative Inference
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The Role of Emotion Regulation in Moral Judgment
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Implicit Theories: Assumptions That Shape Social and Moral Cognition
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Assessing the “social brain” in dementia: applying TASIT-S
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“…here also overlap substantially with brain regions which are active during emotion perception and social inference in healthy adults as shown in previous fMRI studies (e.g., Iacoboni et al. 2004; Phan, Wager, Taylor, & Liberzon 2002; Phan, Wager, Taylor, & Liberzon 2004; Young & Saxe 2009).”
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The Human Factor: Behavioral and Neural Correlates of Humanized Perception in Moral Decision Making
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Distinct neural patterns of social cognition for cooperation versus competition
Tsoi, L., Dungan, J. A., Waytz, A. G., & Young, L. (2016) · NeuroImage · doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2016.04.069 · Cited by 55 · see citing works
Self-citationMoral foundations elicit shared and dissociable cortical activation modulated by political ideology
Hopp, F. R., Amir, O., Fisher, J. T., Grafton, S. T., Sinnott-Armstrong, W. P., & Weber, R. (2023) · Nature Human Behaviour · doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01693-8 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
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A causal role for right temporo-parietal junction in signaling moral conflict
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A non-mentalistic cause-based heuristic in human social evaluations
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The misidentification syndromes as mindreading disorders
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Ethical Leadership as a Balance Between Opposing Neural Networks
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How leaders perceive employee deviance: Blaming victims while excusing favorites.
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- Authors
- Young, L., & Saxe, R.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
- Venue
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
- Publisher
- MIT Press - Journals
- Published
- 2009-07-01
- Volume
- 21
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 1396-1405
- ISSN
- 0898-929X (ISSN-L)
- 1530-8898
- OpenAlex
- W2142847572
- Semantic Scholar
- ba042938610f9a26e4a5f3fa0f5c78fdc2e798c9
- Cited by
- 208
- References
- 54
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 5 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 9 · 2019: 5 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 16 · 2016: 14 · 2015: 18 · 2014: 16 · 2013: 22 · 2012: 18
- FWCI
- 6.21
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Licence
- cc-by-nc
- Locations
- Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Action Observation and Synchronization
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Keywords
- moral judgment, theory of mind, mental state inference, right temporoparietal junction, precuneus, medial prefrontal cortex, moral facts, social cognition
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Analysis of Variance, Brain Mapping, Concept Formation, Culture, Female, Humans, Image Processing, Computer-Assisted, Judgment, Functional Laterality, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Morals, Neuropsychological Tests, Oxygen, Parietal Lobe, Reaction Time, Social Perception, Young Adult
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