We judge own accidental harms more wrong than harms caused by others, hold ourselves more responsible for accidental harms than they hold others, & recruit ‘empathy for pain’ regions more when causing harm, vs observing

When my wrongs are worse than yours: Behavioral and neural asymmetries in first-person and third-person perspectives of accidental harms. Joshua Hirschfeld-Kroen et al. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 94, May 2021, 104102. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2021.104102

Highlights

• People judge own accidental harms more wrong than harms caused by others.

• People hold themselves more responsible for accidental harms than they hold others.

• People recruit ‘empathy for pain’ regions more when causing harm, versus observing.

• People recruit ‘theory of mind’ regions less when causing harm, versus observing.

Abstract: Research on third-party moral judgments highlights two mechanisms as central to moral judgments of accidental harms: the inference of intent and the perception of harm. However, little is known about how these mechanisms are recruited when people evaluate themselves for harm that they have accidentally caused. Here we explore how a person's perspective — as either actor or observer — influences their moral judgments of accidental harm. We use fMRI to investigate how brain regions involved in the inference of intent and the perception of harm differentially respond when participants either cause (first-person) or observe (third-person) accidental harm. First, we find that people judge their own accidental harms more harshly than they judge others' accidents, and hold themselves more responsible for the unintended harmful outcomes of their choices. Second, we find that regions responding to the first-hand experience of pain are also more sensitive to first-person harms relative to third-person harms, and brain-behavior relationships in a subset of these regions suggest that the tendency to judge oneself more harshly may be supported by a greater sensitivity to the victim's experience of harm. Third, though we find that first-person harms recruit regions for mental state inference to a lesser extent than third-person harms, this difference does not appear to account for the behavioral differences in moral judgment between first-person and third-person harms. The results of this experiment suggest that accidental harms are an important context for broadening our understanding of the relationship between agency, empathy, and moral judgments about the self.

Keywords: MoralityAccidentAgencyHarmTheory of mindfMRI