The Dark Side of Morality: Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for Violence

Workman, Clifford I., Keith J. Yoder, and Jean Decety. 2020. “The Dark Side of Morality: Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for Violence.” PsyArXiv. August 18. doi:10.31234/osf.io/t69w4

Abstract: People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitical violence, and determining the extent to which the engagement of these mechanisms was predicted by moral convictions. Participants reported their moral convictions about a variety of sociopolitical issues prior to undergoing functional MRI scanning. During scanning, they were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of violent protests that were ostensibly congruent or incongruent with their views about sociopolitical issues. Complementary univariate and multivariate analytical strategies comparing neural responses to congruent and incongruent violence identified neural mechanisms implicated in processing salience and in the encoding of subjective value. As predicted, neuro-hemodynamic response was modulated parametrically by individuals’ beliefs about the appropriateness of congruent relative to incongruent sociopolitical violence in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and by moral conviction in ventral striatum. Overall moral conviction was predicted by neural response to congruent relative to incongruent violence in amygdala. Together, these findings indicate that moral conviction about sociopolitical issues serves to increase their subjective value, overriding natural aversion to interpersonal harm.

Conclusion
Sociopolitical beliefs, when held with moral conviction, can license violence in service of those beliefs despite ordinarily being morally prohibited. This study characterized the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning moral convictions about sociopolitical issues and beliefs about the appropriateness of ideological violence. Believing violence to be appropriate was associated with parametric increases in vmPFC, while stronger moral conviction was associated with parametric increases in VS and, overall, correlated negatively with activation in amygdala. Together, these findings indicate that moral convictions about sociopolitical issues may raise their subjective value, overriding our natural aversion to interpersonal harm. Value-based decision-making in social contexts provides a powerful platform for understanding sociopolitical and moral decision-making. Disentangling the neurocognitive mechanisms fundamental to value and choice can reveal—at a granular level—physiological boundaries that ultimately constrain our moral psychologies. The theoretical advances afforded by such an undertaking enable more accurate predictions about moral conviction and its impact on social decision-making.

Check also John Villasenor's Views among college students regarding the First Amendment: Results from a new survey. Brookings, September 18, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/18/views-among-college-students-regarding-the-first-amendment-results-from-a-new-survey/

[...] a surprisingly large fraction of students believe it is acceptable to act—including resorting to violence—to shut down expression they consider offensive. And a majority of students appear to want an environment that shields them from being exposed to views they might find offensive.