Amount awarded: $20,000
From seemingly banal decisions regarding exercising and shopping habits, to high-risk questions as to whether one should drive following alcohol consumption, humans are constantly deciding between allocations of harm and reward to ourselves and others. Notably, these decisions are characterized by a presence of conflict (e.g., paying for a cab to get home versus putting others and yourself at risk). In non-moral decision-making, the detection of conflict has been argued to be associated with a potential way to overcome (or at least recognize) biases in decision-making. However, this lens of conflict detection has yet to be turned on ecologically valid types of moral decision-making: processes that involve making intra- and inter-personal decisions with positive or negative valence. To date, research on conflict detection in moral decision-making contexts has been limited to economic games where financial harm and reward are the sole metrics in which the decisions are defined as moral. Recent advances in moral psychology have improved the ecological validity of these paradigms by implementing physical rather than financial harm (i.e., the administration of painful electrical shocks), yet have left conflict detection in these scenarios largely uninvestigated. Nowhere is the investigation of the processes underlying decision-making more important than in the context of moral decision-making, where one has the capacity to allocate harm and rewards to themselves and others. The overall aim of this project is to characterize the behavioral and neurobiological temporal dynamics of conflict detection in inter- and intra-personal moral decision-making, with a specific focus on egoistic and altruistic decisions, in order to make direct comparisons to the temporal dynamics of conflict detection in non-moral decision making. This aim will be achieved by utilizing electroencephalogram (EEG) imaging techniques while subjects participate in a moral decision-making task involving the allocation of harms (i.e., painful electrical shocks) and rewards (i.e., monetary value) between themselves and others and non-moral decision-making tasks involving conflict detection (i.e., the Stroop Task and Eriksen Flanker task). We expect that cognitive conflict detection (rather than perceptual conflict detection) is a task-invariant process, such that the neural mechanisms underlying such a process will be consistent regardless of the moral valence of the task at hand.
This project will address significant gaps in the literature on moral decision-making by examining the (behavioral and neurobiological) temporal dynamics underlying self and other-oriented distributions of harm and benefit through the lens of conflict detection. Additionally, this is the first project to systematically investigate and compare the temporal dynamics of conflict detection in moral vs. non-moral decision-making tasks. Broader Impact: By identifying the temporal dynamics of conflict detection via an ecologically valid moral decision-making paradigm, this study will help to improve our understanding of how altruistic and egoistic decisions culminate in social contexts. As such, this project carries the potential to significantly impact society and increase transparency in self and other-oriented decisions regarding the distribution of harm and welfare.
Olave Krigolson, PhD. Associate Professor, Division of Medical Sciences/Exercise Science, Physical and Health Education, University of Victoria
Corey Allen, PhD. Postdoctoral Scholar, The Mind Research Network
Katherine Boere, PhD Candidate, Department of Neuroscience, University of Victoria
Aliya Dewey, PhD Candidate, Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona