The stereotype of professional roles influences neural responses to moral transgressions: ERP evidence

Abstract

The person-centered account of moral judgments is important since immoral behaviors are diagnostic of an individual’s character. The present study explored how the professional stereotypes associated with the agents shaped the way people perceiving moral/immoral behaviors. The behavioral ratings and neural responses (i.e., P200, N2, LPC event-related potentials (ERPs)) to moral/immoral behaviors done by agents with respectable or ordinary professional roles were recorded and compared. Behaviorally, we found that participants rated the agent with a respectable professional role behaving immorally as more dislikable comparing to the agent with an ordinary professional role. For ERPs, we found that: 1) the agents with respectable professional roles elicited larger P200 than agents with ordinary professional roles did; 2) immoral behavior elicited larger LPC than moral behaviors did; 3) for agents with respectable professional roles, the immoral behaviors elicited significantly more positive N2 than the moral behaviors did whereas this difference was not significant for the agents with ordinary professional roles. The immoral behaviors done by agents with respectable professional roles elicited more positive N2 than the immoral behavior done by agents with ordinary professional roles. Moreover, this effect was correlated with the participants’ subjective rating of the professional roles’ respectable level. These results suggest that 1) the more the agents with respectable professional roles are respected, the more dislikable they became when behaving immorally; 2) the moral stereotype associated with professional roles can influence the early processing stage reflected in N2 but not the later evaluative process reflected in LPC.