RESUMEN
The willingness of humans to engage in third-party punishment (TPP)-a lynchpin of our society-critically depends on the interaction between the wrongdoer's intent and the harm that he caused. But what compels us to punish such individuals when we are unaffected by their harms? Inconsistent with the idealized notion that TPP decisions are based on purely cognitive reasoning, intended harmful acts elicit strong emotional reactions in third-party decision makers. While these emotional responses are now believed to be a driving force in TPP decision making, there is debate about what emotions may be motivating this behavior. Here we show that-unlike anger, contempt, and disgust-moral outrage is evoked by the integration of culpable intent and severe harm, and that the expression of moral outrage alone mediates the relationship between this integrative process and punishment decisions. Sadness had the opposite effect of dampening punishment in response to accidental harms. We take these findings to indicate that moral outrage expresses the interaction of intent and harm in driving third-party punishment behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Asunto(s)
Principios Morales , Castigo , Ira , Emociones/fisiología , Humanos , Intención , Masculino , Castigo/psicologíaRESUMEN
Social norm violations provoke strong emotional reactions that often culminate in punishment of the wrongdoer. This is true not only when we are the victims of the norm violation (second-party), but also when witnessing a complete stranger being victimized (third-party). What remains unclear, however, is whether second- and third-party punishments are associated with different emotions. To address this question, here we examine how subjects respond affectively to both second- and third-party norm violations in an economic game. Our results indicate that while second- and third-parties respond to norm violations by punishing wrongdoers similarly, they report experiencing distinct emotional states as a result of the violation. Specifically, we observed a cross-over interaction between anger and moral outrage depending on the party's context: while anger was more frequently reported for second- than for third-party violations, moral outrage was more evoked by third-party than second-party violations. Disgust and sadness were the most prevalently reported emotions, but their prevalence were unaffected by party contexts. These results indicate that while responses to second- and third-party violations result in similar punishment, they are associated with the expression of distinct affective palettes. Further, our results provide additional evidence that moral outrage is a critical experience in the evaluation of third-party wrongdoings.
Asunto(s)
Emociones/fisiología , Principios Morales , Castigo/psicología , Normas Sociales , Adulto , Ira , Femenino , Humanos , MasculinoRESUMEN
UNLABELLED: The evolved capacity for third-party punishment is considered crucial to the emergence and maintenance of elaborate human social organization and is central to the modern provision of fairness and justice within society. Although it is well established that the mental state of the offender and the severity of the harm he caused are the two primary predictors of punishment decisions, the precise cognitive and brain mechanisms by which these distinct components are evaluated and integrated into a punishment decision are poorly understood. Using fMRI, here we implement a novel experimental design to functionally dissociate the mechanisms underlying evaluation, integration, and decision that were conflated in previous studies of third-party punishment. Behaviorally, the punishment decision is primarily defined by a superadditive interaction between harm and mental state, with subjects weighing the interaction factor more than the single factors of harm and mental state. On a neural level, evaluation of harms engaged brain areas associated with affective and somatosensory processing, whereas mental state evaluation primarily recruited circuitry involved in mentalization. Harm and mental state evaluations are integrated in medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate structures, with the amygdala acting as a pivotal hub of the interaction between harm and mental state. This integrated information is used by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex at the time of the decision to assign an appropriate punishment through a distributed coding system. Together, these findings provide a blueprint of the brain mechanisms by which neutral third parties render punishment decisions. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Punishment undergirds large-scale cooperation and helps dispense criminal justice. Yet it is currently unknown precisely how people assess the mental states of offenders, evaluate the harms they caused, and integrate those two components into a single punishment decision. Using a new design, we isolated these three processes, identifying the distinct brain systems and activities that enable each. Additional findings suggest that the amygdala plays a crucial role in mediating the interaction of mental state and harm information, whereas the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a crucial, final-stage role, both in integrating mental state and harm information and in selecting a suitable punishment amount. These findings deepen our understanding of how punishment decisions are made, which may someday help to improve them.
Asunto(s)
Mapeo Encefálico , Encéfalo/fisiología , Toma de Decisiones/fisiología , Castigo/psicología , Teoría de la Mente/fisiología , Adolescente , Adulto , Encéfalo/diagnóstico por imagen , Femenino , Humanos , Procesamiento de Imagen Asistido por Computador , Imagen por Resonancia Magnética , Masculino , Oxígeno/sangre , Factores de Tiempo , Adulto JovenRESUMEN
Determining the appropriate punishment for a norm violation requires consideration of both the perpetrator's state of mind (for example, purposeful or blameless) and the strong emotions elicited by the harm caused by their actions. It has been hypothesized that such affective responses serve as a heuristic that determines appropriate punishment. However, an actor's mental state often trumps the effect of emotions, as unintended harms may go unpunished, regardless of their magnitude. Using fMRI, we found that emotionally graphic descriptions of harmful acts amplify punishment severity, boost amygdala activity and strengthen amygdala connectivity with lateral prefrontal regions involved in punishment decision-making. However, this was only observed when the actor's harm was intentional; when harm was unintended, a temporoparietal-medial-prefrontal circuit suppressed amygdala activity and the effect of graphic descriptions on punishment was abolished. These results reveal the brain mechanisms by which evaluation of a transgressor's mental state gates our emotional urges to punish.
Asunto(s)
Amígdala del Cerebelo/fisiología , Toma de Decisiones/fisiología , Emociones/fisiología , Imagen por Resonancia Magnética , Corteza Prefrontal/fisiología , Castigo/psicología , Amígdala del Cerebelo/citología , Conducta/fisiología , Mapeo Encefálico , Humanos , Intuición/fisiología , Vías Nerviosas/fisiología , Corteza Prefrontal/citologíaRESUMEN
Recent theoretical models of hippocampal function suggest that the hippocampus plays a critical role in the memory for the overlapping sequences of events that comprise episodic memory. Consistent with this idea, the firing of hippocampal "place cells" have been shown to represent not only location, but also the context or episode in which the location occurs. Thus, hippocampal neurons fire differently in the same location depending on the particular journey or sequence of places in which the subject is traveling. Further, recent work in rats has shown that hippocampal lesions impair memory for sequences of odors and the ability to disambiguate overlapping sequences of odors. We therefore recorded the activity of hippocampal complex-spike cells during a disambiguation of odor sequences task in which the two sequences shared three common odors. Consistent with data from spatial memory tasks, we found that 26 of 44 complex-spike cells fired differentially in the periods before, or during the presentation of the ambiguous odors depending on the sequence in which the odors were presented. This finding further supports the idea that the hippocampus is critical for episodic memory, and extends the physiological evidence to suggest that the hippocampal neurons play a broader role representing sequences of both spatial and nonspatial information.