ArticleSocial cognitive and affective neuroscience2020
Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying immoral decisions benefiting self or others.
Article in Social cognitive and affective neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Neural Correlates of Moral Judgment in Dilemma Versus Non-Dilemma Contexts.Brain and behavior · 2026Review
- Moral and perceptual conflict processing are implemented by distinct brain activation and functional connectivity patterns.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Is the bad apple or the bad basket to be blamed? Neural substrate of self-interest and conformity motivation during the contagion of dishonesty.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2026Article
- Wired for Corruption: Inter-Brain Synchrony Encodes Bribery-Related Value Information and Predicts Bribery Agreement.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2026Article
- Moral conviction interacts with metacognitive ability in modulating neural activity during sociopolitical decision-making.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Beyond monetary value: how reward type drives cheating in a gender-judgment task.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Why people engage in corrupt collaboration: an observation at the multi-brain level.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Distinctive roles of mPFC subregions in forming impressions and guiding social interaction based on others' social behaviour.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- A computational account of how individuals resolve the dilemma of dirty money.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Decision flexibilities in autism spectrum disorder: an fMRI study of moral dilemmas.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2022Article
- Neural basis of corruption in power-holders.eLife · 2021Article
- Right Temporoparietal Junction Underlies Avoidance of Moral Transgression in Autism Spectrum Disorder.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
Immoral behavior often consists of weighing transgression of a moral norm against maximizing personal profits. One important question is to understand why immoral behaviors vary based on who receives specific benefits and what are the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying such moral flexibility. Here, we used model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how immoral behaviors change when benefiting oneself or someone else. Participants were presented with offers requiring a tradeoff between a moral cost (i.e. profiting a morally bad cause) and a benefit for either oneself or a charity. Participants were more willing to obtain ill-gotten profits for themselves than for a charity, driven by a devaluation of the moral cost when deciding for their own interests. The subjective value of an immoral offer, computed as a linear summation of the weighed monetary gain and moral cost, recruited the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) regardless of beneficiaries. Moreover, paralleling the behavioral findings, this region enhanced its functional coupling with mentalizing-related regions while deciding whether to gain morally tainted profits for oneself vs charity. Finally, individual differences in moral preference differentially modulated choice-specific signals in the dorsolateral PFC according to who benefited from the decisions. These findings provide insights for understanding the neurobiological basis of moral flexibility.
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