From actions to empathy and morality – A neural perspective

Abstract

Our culturally varied, complex social world, governed by unwritten moral codes that encourage affiliative helping behavior, may be subserved by the unique properties of a neural system for understanding the intentions and actions of others. The firing pattern of neurons within this system appears to ‘mirror’ an action performed and seen, coding a functional correspondence between a motor action and sensory perception of that action. Indirect evidence acquired through various neuroimaging techniques supports the presence of such a neural system, termed the mirror neuron system (MNS) in the human brain. In this paper I discuss evidence suggesting that the human MNS – by linking intention and outcome, perception and action, observer and actor – forms part of the neural system for empathic concern, the capacity to understand and feel another's emotional state. By helping to establish a ‘likeness’ between interacting agents, the human MNS may support the active desire to understand others, to feel what they are feeling and to help alleviate another's suffering. By providing a biological substrate for such fundamental affiliative behaviors, the MNS may provide a neural scaffold for the evolution of our sophisticated sociality and the morality that governs it.