Juggling morality while learning can be a difficult and time-consuming task. Morality includes our principles, values, and beliefs about what is right and wrong, and it influences our behavior and decision-making.
A new study from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience sheds light on how the brain deals with morally conflicting outcomes while learning. ‘People who choose their own gain at the expense of others can understand and empathize with the potential negative consequences, but they still choose to pursue their own benefit.’
We must sometimes learn that certain actions are beneficial to us but harmful to others, whereas alternative actions are less beneficial to us but prevent harm to others. It is unknown how we balance these morally conflicting outcomes while learning. In particular, if you ultimately want to choose the most profitable option for yourself, would you ignore the fact that doing so harms others?
Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience show that participants’ preferences differ significantly, with some preferring actions that benefit themselves and others preferring actions that prevent harm, putting them in a unique position to investigate how people deal with the ‘collateral damage’ that this choice entails. Do they turn a blind eye or act fully conscious? Laura Fornari, Kalliopi Ioumpa, and their team, led by Valeria Gazzola and Christian Keysers, investigated how participants learn the uncomfortable truth that sometimes self-money means other-harm, and how they adapt to changes during the tasks.
We know where in the brain people normally process other people’s pain. We discovered activity in those brain regions that tracked how much pain the other person was experiencing independently of the participant’s preferences. This explains why even the most self-centered participants were aware of the suffering they were causing.
Valeria Gazzola
Test with symbols
During the experiments, participants had to learn that one of two symbols resulted in large monetary gains for themselves 80% of the time, and a painful but tolerable shock to the hand of another human being with the same probability. The other symbol resulted in 80% of the time low monetary gains for the self and 80% of the time lower intensity, non-painful shocks to the confederate. Participants did not know the associations between symbols and outcomes at the start of each block.
“Overall, people had consistent preferences: some preferred the option that gave them more money, while others preferred the option that prevented shocks to others.” Previous research had already revealed this. “What we were really interested in was how they would learn which symbol satisfies their preference,” Valeria Gazzola, the project’s senior investigator, explained. “And here’s where things get interesting: would someone who ultimately wants to make money, and thus chooses the option that provides more money, conveniently ignore the fact that this hurts others”?
Avoiding empathy to minimize moral conflict?
Laura Fornari: ‘Using computational modeling we showed that this is not the case: participants tracked expected values of self-benefits and other harms separately throughout the task. This means that participants that over time chose to maximize their benefits learned and remained aware of the pain they were causing to the other. Brain patterns coding the pain of others were indeed found to correlate with how much pain we expect our choice to cause. This suggests that even when attention is directed to the specific aim to maximize our gain at the expense of others, empathic responses do still occur allowing us to remain aware of the pain we cause”
But why do people do such things? Why don’t they make their lives easier and prioritize their own gains over the pain of others? The team could demonstrate that this is most likely to allow participants to adapt to changing circumstances. The authors abruptly removed one of the two opposing forces in the moral quandary. “We told the participants that for the next ten trials, everything would be the same except that we wouldn’t pay out any of the money,” Laura Fornari explained. Participants may have continued to use their preferred symbol if they hadn’t learned which symbol was hurting the other participant, despite the money taken from the event. Yet, they quickly shifted away from it because they knew it would hurt the other.
“We were also able to demonstrate that, despite participants updating their choices based on the removed outcome, this shift was not total, and a bias toward the preferred outcome remained.” This implies that people maximizing self-benefits will choose that option less frequently than when money was paid out, but will not completely change their decision to choose the other-benefiting option all of the time. “How much weight we give to money influences our choices and how much we learn about the pain of others,” Christian Keysers continues.
But what exactly happened in the brain of the participants?
“We know where in the brain people normally process other people’s pain. We discovered activity in those brain regions that tracked how much pain the other person was experiencing independently of the participant’s preferences. This explains why even the most self-centered participants were aware of the suffering they were causing. However, brain regions associated with value signals represented the pain of others less in participants who chose to prevent harm to others less frequently.
Thus, our brain juggles moral learning in interesting ways: somewhere we realize what we do objectively, while somewhere else, we value this impact more or less depending on our ultimate goals,’ Kalliopi Ioumpa concludes.
“In the future, our novel approach that combines learning and decision-making in a morally conflicting context could be applied to atypical populations that exhibit less socially-adaptive behaviors,” says Laura Fornari. For example, it would be interesting to see if people with antisocial tendencies have a similar ability to track separate associations over time, or if they are better able to suppress their reactions to the pain of others and focus solely on the outcome of interest.”
