Poster No:
845
Submission Type:
Abstract Submission
Authors:
JuYoung Kim1, Hackjin Kim1
Institutions:
1Korea University, Seoul, Korea, Republic of
First Author:
Co-Author:
Introduction:
Moral decision-making is often intuitive, where individuals align their choices with societal norms. Adhering to this sense of moral duty may reduce metabolic costs (Theriault et al., 2021), ultimately enhancing survival. Interoception, the sense of the body's internal state, is crucial in allostatic processes of the brain. However, empirical examination regarding the connection between moral decision-making and an individual's awareness of introspective interoceptive signals has been lacking.
Our hypothesis posits that individuals with higher interoceptive sensitivity are more likely to align with prevailing moral norms. Conforming to societal expectations may enhance the predictability of one's social environment, reducing the need for others to revise their expectations of the conformer's intentions or behavior, and ultimately decreasing metabolic expenditure. Consequently, higher interoceptive sensitivity is expected to correlate with a greater propensity to adhere to prevailing moral standards.
Methods:
For the online moral dilemma task, 48 scenarios were translated into Korean and assessed for clarity and difficulty by 14 native Korean university students. Participants, acting as protagonists, made binary utilitarian or deontological choices and rated decision difficulty on a Likert scale. Group consensus moral decisions per scenario were determined by majority choice (52 or more participants) and as a continuous ratio of utilitarian decisions. Individual moral tendencies towards group consensus were calculated based on the group consensus moral decisions. Moral similarity was calculated as the ratio of individual's moral decisions matching the group consensus moral decisions, and moral distance was calculated as the Euclidean distance between participants' choices and the group's utilitarian decision ratio.
Functional connectivity analysis and a Hidden Markov model explored resting state neural dynamics related to moral alignment with the group. The whole brain functional connectivity of the anterior insula, a region critically involved in processing interoceptive information (Kleckner et al., 2017), was assessed. For the Hidden Markov model, the time series of the brain areas included in the classic resting-state networks that are involved in interoceptive processing and social decision-making were used as input and the model with the optimal number of hidden states was selected based on BIC scores. The fractional occupancy of each state was calculated and correlated with the participants' moral distance measure. The functions of the hidden states were inferred through meta-analytic functional decoding using the Neurosynth database.
Results:
Participants consistently aligned their moral decisions with group consensus in both Study 1(M = .790, SD = .054, t(73) = 46.165, p < .001) and Study 2 (M = .718, SD = .130, t(29) = 9.177, p < .001). In Study 1, subjective interoceptive awareness positively correlated with moral similarity (r(74) = .237, p = .042) and negatively with moral distance from group consensus (r(74) = -.240, p = .039), the two measures of moral alignment with the group. In Study 2, interoceptive accuracy, assessed through the heartbeat detection task, correlated with moral similarity (r(30) = .422, p = .020) and moral distance (r(30) = -.436, p = .016).
The strength in the functional connectivity between the anterior insula and the precuneus (MNI: x = 4, y = -52, z = 30, p-FDR = .017) was negatively correlated with the moral distance measure. Also, the fractional occupancy of the hidden brain state characterized by lowered activity in the precuneus and the medial prefrontal cortex positively correlated with moral distance (r(74) = .329, p = .004).
Conclusions:
In summary, this study provides empirical support for the crucial role of interoception in shaping and implementing intuitive moral decisions aligned with group consensus, along with the neural dynamics associated with this tendency.
Emotion, Motivation and Social Neuroscience:
Social Neuroscience Other 1
Higher Cognitive Functions:
Decision Making 2
Keywords:
Other - moral decision making, interoception
1|2Indicates the priority used for review
Provide references using author date format
Kleckner, I. R. (2017). Evidence for a large-scale brain system supporting allostasis and interoception in humans. Nature human behaviour, 1(5), 0069.
Theriault, J. E. (2021). The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure. Physics of Life Reviews, 36, 100-136.