Abstract
Investigation of neural and cognitive processes underlying individual variation in moral preferences is underway, with notable similarities emerging between moral- and risk-based decision-making. Here we specifically assessed moral distributive justice preferences and non-moral financial gambling preferences in the same individuals, and report an association between these seemingly disparate forms of decision-making. Moreover, we find this association between distributive justice and risky decision-making exists primarily when the latter is assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task. These findings are consistent with neuroimaging studies of brain function during moral and risky decision-making. This research also constitutes the first replication of a novel experimental measure of distributive justice decision-making, for which individual variation in performance was found. Further examination of decision-making processes across different contexts may lead to an improved understanding of the factors affecting moral behaviour.
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Notes
See [5] for a further comparison of insula involvement in moral and non-moral decision-making outside of the distributive justice context.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant (DP 0988514) to JH. TTN is supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council (ID 490976). SMM is supported by the Victorian Neurotrauma Initiative (DF05) and the National Health and Medical Research Council. We thank Dinah Cragg for assistance with the DJT analysis, and Anthony Hannan for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.
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Contains details of the slideshow employed in the distributive justice task and a description of the method for calculating the inequity-aversion parameter. (PDF 203 kb)
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Palmer, C.J., Paton, B., Ngo, T.T. et al. Individual Differences in Moral Behaviour: A Role for Response to Risk and Uncertainty?. Neuroethics 6, 97–103 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-012-9158-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-012-9158-4