Neuropsychology of moral judgment and risk seeking: what in common? A new look at emotional contribution to decision- making

Abstract

Introduction: what role for emotions in moral decisional processes and gain-related behavior? Contemporary decision research in economics, business, psychology, and neuroscience now accepts the idea that emotions play a significant role in decisionmaking. Specifically, it was supposed that emotional correlates intervene in decisional processes directed toward moral contexts and moral dilemmas. A second main domain where emotions are highly implicated regards the decisional mechanism related to tasks in which a gain or a loss is implicated. Both of these contexts require, in fact, a decision in which the subject is the direct agent of an emotional-relevant behavior. Nevertheless, the implication of emotions into moral decisions and gainrelated performance was discussed and criticized by some authors. Some models indicate that moral judgment is a rational, deliberative endeavor. In this perspective emotions generate reactive attitudes (Strawson 1960) on the basis of rational appraisals, but moral judgment is primarily a conscious process of deliberate reflection. Other models (Haidt 2001; Prinz 2006), by contrast, maintain that reason is the “slave of the passions,” that moral psychology is essentially emotive and that deliberative mechanisms are recruited only to provide post-hoc rationalizations of moral judgments. Finally, other perspectives (Damasio 1994; Greene et al. 2001, 2004) have also been developed on the basis of recent neurophysiological data, indicating that both emotional and deliberative mechanisms are recruited in making moral judgments. However, there are actually many theoretical positions consistent with a variety of conceptually and empirically distinct claims about the relationship between emotion and moral psychology, with at least three specifically implicated thus far:1 Neuroscientific studies (Blair 1995; Greene et al. 2001, 2004; Greene and Haidt 2002) demonstrate that emotional structures are recruited in making moral judgments.