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Commanding or Being a Simple Intermediary: How Does It Affect Moral Behavior and Related Brain Mechanisms?
Psychology and neuroscience research have shown that fractioning operations among several individuals along a hierarchical chain allows diffusing responsibility between components of the chain, which has the potential to disinhibit antisocial actions. Here, we present two studies, one using fMRI (St...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Society for Neuroscience
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9581580/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36171058 http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0508-21.2022 |
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author | Caspar, Emilie A. Ioumpa, Kalliopi Arnaldo, Irene Di Angelis, Lorenzo Gazzola, Valeria Keysers, Christian |
author_facet | Caspar, Emilie A. Ioumpa, Kalliopi Arnaldo, Irene Di Angelis, Lorenzo Gazzola, Valeria Keysers, Christian |
author_sort | Caspar, Emilie A. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Psychology and neuroscience research have shown that fractioning operations among several individuals along a hierarchical chain allows diffusing responsibility between components of the chain, which has the potential to disinhibit antisocial actions. Here, we present two studies, one using fMRI (Study 1) and one using EEG (Study 2), designed to help understand how commanding or being in an intermediary position impacts the sense of agency and empathy for pain. In the age of military drones, we also explored whether commanding a human or robot agent influences these measures. This was done within a single behavioral paradigm in which participants could freely decide whether or not to send painful shocks to another participant in exchange for money. In Study 1, fMRI reveals that activation in social cognition-related and empathy-related brain regions was equally low when witnessing a victim receive a painful shock while participants were either commander or simple intermediary transmitting an order, compared with being the agent directly delivering the shock. In Study 2, results indicated that the sense of agency did not differ between commanders and intermediary, no matter whether the executing agent was a robot or a human. However, we observed that the neural response over P3 event-related potential was higher when the executing agent was a robot compared with a human. Source reconstruction of the EEG signal revealed that this effect was mediated by areas including the insula and ACC. Results are discussed regarding the interplay between the sense of agency and empathy for pain for decision-making. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9581580 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Society for Neuroscience |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-95815802022-10-20 Commanding or Being a Simple Intermediary: How Does It Affect Moral Behavior and Related Brain Mechanisms? Caspar, Emilie A. Ioumpa, Kalliopi Arnaldo, Irene Di Angelis, Lorenzo Gazzola, Valeria Keysers, Christian eNeuro Research Article: Confirmation Psychology and neuroscience research have shown that fractioning operations among several individuals along a hierarchical chain allows diffusing responsibility between components of the chain, which has the potential to disinhibit antisocial actions. Here, we present two studies, one using fMRI (Study 1) and one using EEG (Study 2), designed to help understand how commanding or being in an intermediary position impacts the sense of agency and empathy for pain. In the age of military drones, we also explored whether commanding a human or robot agent influences these measures. This was done within a single behavioral paradigm in which participants could freely decide whether or not to send painful shocks to another participant in exchange for money. In Study 1, fMRI reveals that activation in social cognition-related and empathy-related brain regions was equally low when witnessing a victim receive a painful shock while participants were either commander or simple intermediary transmitting an order, compared with being the agent directly delivering the shock. In Study 2, results indicated that the sense of agency did not differ between commanders and intermediary, no matter whether the executing agent was a robot or a human. However, we observed that the neural response over P3 event-related potential was higher when the executing agent was a robot compared with a human. Source reconstruction of the EEG signal revealed that this effect was mediated by areas including the insula and ACC. Results are discussed regarding the interplay between the sense of agency and empathy for pain for decision-making. Society for Neuroscience 2022-10-14 /pmc/articles/PMC9581580/ /pubmed/36171058 http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0508-21.2022 Text en Copyright © 2022 Caspar et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium provided that the original work is properly attributed. |
spellingShingle | Research Article: Confirmation Caspar, Emilie A. Ioumpa, Kalliopi Arnaldo, Irene Di Angelis, Lorenzo Gazzola, Valeria Keysers, Christian Commanding or Being a Simple Intermediary: How Does It Affect Moral Behavior and Related Brain Mechanisms? |
title | Commanding or Being a Simple Intermediary: How Does It Affect Moral Behavior and Related Brain Mechanisms? |
title_full | Commanding or Being a Simple Intermediary: How Does It Affect Moral Behavior and Related Brain Mechanisms? |
title_fullStr | Commanding or Being a Simple Intermediary: How Does It Affect Moral Behavior and Related Brain Mechanisms? |
title_full_unstemmed | Commanding or Being a Simple Intermediary: How Does It Affect Moral Behavior and Related Brain Mechanisms? |
title_short | Commanding or Being a Simple Intermediary: How Does It Affect Moral Behavior and Related Brain Mechanisms? |
title_sort | commanding or being a simple intermediary: how does it affect moral behavior and related brain mechanisms? |
topic | Research Article: Confirmation |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9581580/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36171058 http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0508-21.2022 |
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