Abstract
The aims of this systematic review were to determine: (a) which brain areas are consistently more active when making (i) moral response decisions, defined as choosing a response to a moral dilemma, or deciding whether to accept a proposed solution, or (ii) moral evaluations, defined as judging the appropriateness of another’s actions in a moral dilemma, rating moral statements as right or wrong, or identifying important moral issues; and (b) shared and significantly different activation patterns for these two types of moral judgements. A systematic search of the literature returned 28 experiments. Activation likelihood estimate analysis identified the brain areas commonly more active for moral response decisions and for moral evaluations. Conjunction analysis revealed shared activation for both types of moral judgement in the left middle temporal gyrus, cingulate gyrus, and medial frontal gyrus. Contrast analyses found no significant clusters of increased activation for the moral evaluations-moral response decisions contrast, but found that moral response decisions additionally activated the left and right middle temporal gyrus and the right precuneus. Making one’s own moral decisions involves different brain areas compared to judging the moral actions of others, implying that these judgements may involve different processes.
Highlights
Over the past decade, functional magnetic resonance imaging has increasingly been used to measure the neural correlates of moral decision-making, adding to our understanding of the cognitive and affective processes involved
We only found a significant cluster of activation of this region for moral evaluations (ME) and the adjacent Brodmann Area (BA) 9, rather than moral response decisions (MRD), and this region did not remain significant in the conjunction analysis, probably because it was the smallest of the clusters found for MEs
The lack of a significant cluster of activation in the vmPFC for MRDs highlights that most previous conclusions about brain activation for moral decision-making have been made based on ME tasks; further research on the involvement of this region for MRDs is needed, as the current review only identified 10 relevant MRD experiments
Summary
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has increasingly been used to measure the neural correlates of moral decision-making, adding to our understanding of the cognitive and affective processes involved. There are issues with a lack of consistency amongst studies (Christensen & Gomila, 2012); a variety of different tasks have been used, and there are no agreed definitions, meaning that moral terms such as judgement, reasoning, sensitivity and moral cognition are all used differently across experiments. The distinction between different types of moral judgement has not been explicitly recognised amongst cognitive neuroscientists, with recent meta-analyses in this field grouping all task types together when analysing the neural correlates of moral decision-making. Task-type may influence the results, and whether moral judgements related to the self involve different processes, and different brain areas relative to moral judgements about others has not yet been considered in previous systematic reviews
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