Project Awarded: $30,000

Recent years have seen a burst of interest in sex and gender from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Within the philosophical literature it has recently been argued that women, compared to men, are more strongly expected to provide certain moral goods including care and that these patriarchal gender norms are implicitly and explicitly enforced through moral judgements and punishments for perceived norm violations. Previous work in neuroscience suggests that expectancy violations should elicit norm prediction errors. However, the neuroscience literature on moral judgment has developed largely separately from philosophical theorizing about gendered social norms and has mostly centered on violations of fairness or reciprocity rather than on violations of care. Tying together research from neuroeconomics, organizational and social psychology, and philosophy, we hypothesize that men and women will be judged differently for failing to show care within close relationships, and that such gender disparities in moral judgment will be reflected in neural signaling of norm prediction errors. Using fMRI, we will look for two distinct patterns of activity described in the recent neuroscience literature: detection of a norm violation, associated with activity in the so-called salience network and dopaminergic frontostriatal circuits, and making moral judgements about the violation, associated primarily with activity in the mentalizing network. The behavioral and neural evidence to date suggests that norm violation and moral judgements are core mechanisms underlying actual punishment, and that norms for moralized social behavior and the engagement of the mentalizing network may vary systematically across male-and female-gendered transgressors. We plan to test these ideas using fMRI and adaptations of tasks traditionally used for measuring moral judgements.