Abstract
Moral advice (how to behave in life) is often conveyed by short, simple sentence constructions: “You – should – (plus verb with moral meaning).” Yet how moral prescriptions are processed has never been studied from a neurocognitive perspective. The results of this study suggest that the contingent negative variation (CNV) serves as a neural correlate for moral (and immoral) predictive phrases. In step 1, the original CNV paradigm (S1–S2–motor response) was extended using action-demanding three-word phrases taken from everyday contexts (e.g., “Ready–Set–Go”). In step 2, these commands were replaced by abstract words, each phrase then including a verb of moral or immoral meaning (e.g., “You should hope,” “You should praise,” and “You should lie”). During recording, each phrase type (e.g., moral or immoral) was presented blockwise. The task varied according to block order: Participants (n = 19) had to either listen attentively or respond with a finger tap immediately after the final word of a phrase. Electroencephalogram (EEG) data were bandpass filtered (0.1–30 Hz) and analyzed at the onset of the second word, yielding two independent responses: a bilateral CNV and a bilateral motor-related negativity, both decreasing from anterior to posterior. The results show that the CNV is sensitive to phrase constructions of moral resp. immoral valence. Thus, transfer to remote semantic fields seems possible. Importantly, this transfer is combined with a change of time frames, from restricted and highly pragmatic (as in the original paradigm) to indefinite and vague. Thus, a CNV may indicate not only preparation to action but also general guidelines for social life. An N400 occurring as an additional, task-dependent result cannot be sufficiently explained on the basis of the present data.
Highlights
Doing good or evil, acting right or wrong? Human behavior is often guided by a set of social standards and a person’s value system
A common approach to study the brain mechanisms of moral decision making and moral behavior is to create a case of moral conflict, that is, “moral dilemma.”
Note that the total length for each phrase construction is slightly longer because for this, the decay of the final word has been taken into account
Summary
Doing good or evil, acting right or wrong? Human behavior is often guided by a set of social standards and a person’s value system. The term describes a paradoxical but real-life situation in which a person has to make a choice between two mutually exclusive options, which means, for example, that the person’s willingness to help one side is unavoidably combined with an inability to help the other. This catch-22 may lead to inner conflict, in particular in situations in which people need to be rescued from danger (e.g., Christensen and Gomila, 2012)
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