During the fight with a moral dilemma, a person can make a decision not only by reflecting on the problem but also by solving the physical signals of their body, suggests a new study.
Research has revealed that people who are more in line with their body signals – such as changes in their heart rate – tend to make moral decisions that align themselves with the judgments that most others would make if they were presented the same scenario. These results suggest that these internal physical clues could play a role in guiding a person’s moral intuition, the study authors said.
“Morality is often considered a product of culture and context”, ” Tamami NakanoA cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Osaka who was not involved in the study, said in Live Science in an email. “Showing that body signals actively mediate this calibration is both new and convincing.”
In short, the study supports the idea that these bodily reactions are part of a feedback loop which helps to guide people in their decision -making.
Moreover, previous studies have suggested that the majority of the majority in a moral dilemma could help eliminate a certain brain tension, and the new study also seems to align with this notion.
“Recent theories suggest that our brains are designed to minimize the consumption of physical resources while maintaining survival”, co-author of the study Hackjin KimA neuroscientist from the University of Korea, told Live Science in an email. “One way to do so (keeping energy) is to learn the expectations of others to avoid social conflicts,” Kim suggested. By combining these ideas, Kim and her colleagues proposed that people who are better listening to their bodily feedback signals can use this information to maintain their decision -making in accordance with the expectations of others.
In relation: People can really communicate with their eyes, the results of the study
In their new study, published on May 5 The Journal of NeuroscienceThe team tested this hypothesis by presenting participants with moral dilemmas and asking them to choose between two decisions – a “utility”, which prioritized the minimization of damage for the most people, and an “ethical”, which prioritized the established rules and standards.
In a separate test, the researchers asked the participants to focus on their bodies and count their heartbeat in a short interval while the cardiac beats of the participants were simultaneously recorded with an electrocardiogram.
People who were more precise to count their heartbeat also tended to choose the moral decision that most other people have chosen, noted the team. This was true that more people choose the utility or ethical option for a given moral dilemma.
The clues of a person’s body may help report when the person is about to do something that could come up against social standards – a scenario that requires more energy and efforts to navigate, offer the authors of the study. Basically, it is easier to go with the flow than to run against the grain.
“The idea is this feeling that anxiety will point out that you have done something to provoke this anxiety, then make you try to avoid doing these things in the future,” said Jordan TheriaultPsychologist and biologist at the Northeastern University who was not involved in the study. “You feel these comments from your body, then you learn not to start the future,” he told Live Science. As Theriault describes, you learn over time what others expect from you morally, and your physical reactions are part of the feedback loop which helps to guide future decision -making.
In the study, the participants responded to each dilemma without knowing the two options that other people have chosen. They were not in a hurry to make a certain decision or to comply with what the rest of the group was without knowing it, so the results reflect the moral intuition of each individual. In particular, the 104 participants were Korean university students, it is therefore possible that they shared similar cultural and demographic history as well as similar moral standards.
The team also studied people’s brains at rest to determine the time they spent in different “brain states” – brain activity models associated with different types of tasks. The brain rocks between many different states, even when a person does nothing specific.
To follow these states, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (IRM), which follows blood flow as an indirect brain activity. The researchers found that people who were more aware of the signals of their bodies tended to spend more time in a brain state associated with evaluation and judgment. This particular state was marked by an activity in a brain region called the medial prefrontal cortex, which was previously linked to the process of adjusting choices to meet the expectations of others.
In relation: On what part of your brain do you need to survive?
These brain analyzes can also support the idea that people who are more in line with their bodily signals use these clues to remain aligned with majority opinion. However, because this data has been collected separately from moral decision -making tasks, “we always need evidence based on tasks showing which specific brain regions deal with body -related signals when people are confronted with real moral dilemmas and how these signals influence behavior in real time,” said Nakano to Live Science. This could mean that people are faced with moral dilemmas in an irmf scanner.
In future work, Kim plans to study how the relationship between moral intuition and consciousness of bodily signals varies according to cultures, the types of moral dilemmas and individual personality differences. But for the moment, Kim said: “This research throws a new theoretical framework to understand the cultural and individual differences in moral behavior and predict the monitoring behavior of group or online standards.”
