When Minds Matter for Moral Judgment: Intent Information is Neurally Encoded for Harmful But Not Impure Acts

Recent behavioral evidence indicates a key role for intent in moral judgments of harmful acts (e.g., assault) but not impure acts (e.g., incest). We tested whether the neural responses in regions for mental state reasoning, including the right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), are greater when people evaluate harmful versus impure violations. 

In addition, using multi-voxel pattern analysis, we investigated whether the voxel-wise pattern in these regions distinguishes intentional from accidental actions, for either kind of violation. The RTPJ was preferentially recruited in response to harmful versus impure acts. Moreover, although its response was equally high for intentional and accidental acts, the voxel-wise pattern in the RTPJ distinguished intentional from accidental acts in the harm domain but not the purity domain. 

Finally, we found that the degree to which the RTPJ discriminated between intentional and accidental acts predicted the impact of intent information on moral judgments, but again only in the harm domain. 

These findings reveal intent to be a uniquely critical factor for moral evaluations of harmful versus impure acts, and shed light on the neural computations for mental state reasoning.

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By:  Chakroff A1, Dungan J2, Koster-Hale J3, Brown A2, Saxe R4, Young L2.

• 1. Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA alekchakroff@gmail.com.
• 2. Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA.
• 3. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
• 4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

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