ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2014
The Good, the bad, and the just: justice sensitivity predicts neural response during moral evaluation of actions performed by others.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 55 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
55 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
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- The right temporoparietal junction in attention and social interaction: A transcranial magnetic stimulation study.Human brain mapping · 2016Pooled it
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- Neural Correlates of Moral Judgment in Dilemma Versus Non-Dilemma Contexts.Brain and behavior · 2026Review
- Dopaminergic modulation of the sense of agency influences moral behavior in Parkinson's disease.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Mapping trait justice sensitivity in the Brain: Whole-brain resting-state functional connectivity as a predictor of other-oriented not self-oriented justice sensitivity.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Born to Fear the Machine? Genetic and Environmental Influences on Negative Attitudes toward AI Agents.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- The effect of moral identity on facial emotion processing in adolescents with hearing loss: an event-related potentials study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2025Article
- Three-stage Dynamic Brain-cognitive Model of Understanding Action Intention Displayed by Human Body Movements.Brain topography · 2024Review
- Intersubject correlations in reward and mentalizing brain circuits separately predict persuasiveness of two types of ISIS video propaganda.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Theoretical and Empirical Foundations for a Unified Pyramid of Human Motivation.Integrative psychological & behavioral science · 2024Review
- Role of right temporoparietal junction for counterfactual evaluation of partner's decision in ultimatum game.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Being good to look good: Self-reported moral character predicts moral double standards among reputation-seeking individuals.British journal of psychology (London, England : 1953) · 2023Article
- Sympathy-Empathy and the Radicalization of Young People.Children (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Self-Conscious Emotions and the Right Fronto-Temporal and Right Temporal Parietal Junction.Brain sciences · 2022Review
- Neural computations in children's third-party interventions are modulated by their parents' moral values.NPJ science of learning · 2021Article
- Neuroanatomy of complex social emotion dysregulation in adolescent offenders.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Neural underpinnings of morality judgment and moral aesthetic judgment.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Explicit and implicit markers of fairness preeminence in criminal judges.Scientific reports · 2021Article
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Abstract
Morality is a fundamental component of human cultures and has been defined as prescriptive norms regarding how people should treat one another, including concepts such as justice, fairness, and rights. Using fMRI, the current study examined the extent to which dispositions in justice sensitivity (i.e., how individuals react to experiences of injustice and unfairness) predict behavioral ratings of praise and blame and how they modulate the online neural response and functional connectivity when participants evaluate morally laden (good and bad) everyday actions. Justice sensitivity did not impact the neuro-hemodynamic response in the action-observation network but instead influenced higher-order computational nodes in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ), right dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (rdlPFC, dmPFC) that process mental states understanding and maintain goal representations. Activity in these regions predicted praise and blame ratings. Further, the hemodynamic response in rTPJ showed a differentiation between good and bad actions 2 s before the response in rdlPFC. Evaluation of good actions was specifically associated with enhanced activity in dorsal striatum and increased the functional coupling between the rTPJ and the anterior cingulate cortex. Together, this study provides important knowledge in how individual differences in justice sensitivity impact neural computations that support psychological processes involved in moral judgment and mental-state reasoning.
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