When wrestling with a moral dilemma, a person may reach a decision not only by thinking through the problem but also by tuning into physical signals from their body, a new study suggests.
The research found that people who are more in tune with their body signals — such as shifts in their heart rate — tend to make moral decisions that align with the judgments that most other people would make if presented the same scenario. These findings suggest that such internal, physical cues could thus play a role in guiding a person’s moral intuition, the study authors said.
“Morality is often viewed as a product of culture and context,” Tamami Nakano, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Osaka who was not involved in the study, told Live Science in an email. “Showing that bodily signals actively mediate this calibration is both novel and compelling.”
In short, the study supports the idea that these bodily reactions form part of a feedback loop that helps guide people in their decision making.
What’s more, previous studies have suggested that siding with the majority in a moral dilemma could help take some strain off the brain, and the new study seems to align with that notion, too.
“Recent theories suggest that our brains are designed to minimize physical resource consumption while maintaining survival,” study co-author Hackjin Kim, a neuroscientist at Korea University, told Live Science in an email. “One way to do this [conserve energy] is to learn others’ expectations to avoid social conflict,” Kim suggested. Combining these ideas, Kim and colleagues proposed that people who are better attuned to their bodily feedback signals may use that information to keep their decision-making in line with others’ expectations.
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In their new study, published May 5 in The Journal of Neuroscience, the team tested this hypothesis by presenting participants with moral dilemmas and asking them to choose between two decisions — one “utilitarian,” which prioritized minimizing harm for the most people, and one “deontological,” which prioritized following established rules and norms.
In a separate test, the researchers asked the participants to focus on their bodies and count their heartbeats over a short interval while the participants’ heartbeats were simultaneously recorded with an…
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