HEИндивидуална стипендия2024–2026

YOURMORALS · The role of social presence on moral decision-making : realistic settings for the understanding of utilitarian and deontological preferences

„Хоризонт Европа“ — Действия „Мария Склодовска-Кюри“

Период: 2024-02-01 → 2026-01-31
Финансиране от ЕС: 175 920 €
Участници: 1
Схема: HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF

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Накратко на български

Социалният контекст и присъствието на други хора влияят върху моралните ни избори, например когато лекар взема решение пред свои колеги. Това помага да се разбере как очакванията на групата и авторитетът променят поведението и работата на мозъка ни.

Този кратък обзор е генериран от изкуствен интелект

Кратко обяснение, генерирано от езиков модел по текста на CORDIS. Оригиналът е по-долу.

Резултати накратко

The role of social presence on moral decision-making : realistic settings for the understanding of utilitarian and deontological preferences

Imagine a doctor making a triage decision while being observed by colleagues, a judge deliberating in a politically charged courtroom, or a professional facing an ethical dilemma within a hierarchical organisation. In each case, a moral decision must be made, but not alone or in isolation. The presence of others, the expectations of a group, and the dynamics of authority are all key factors. For decades, the scientific study of moral decision-making has largely overlooked this question. The dominant approach has been to present individuals with hypothetical moral dilemmas in isolated laboratory settings, where a single participant reads a scenario alone and selects a response. This approach has generated foundational theoretical insights. However, it has also produced a science of morality based on the rarely justified assumption that moral decisions are made independently of social context. Yet moral decisions are made in the presence of peers, authority figures, and institutional structures whose expectations, judgements, and behaviours inevitably influence individual choices. The YourMorals project was designed to answer the central question of how these social factors shape the moral choices we make. Through a programme of empirical research combining behavioural science, cognitive neuroscience, and computational methods, the main goal was to characterise how social context — from the mere presence of an observer to real-time social interaction — shapes moral decision-making at both the behavioural and neurophysiological levels. Three interconnected objectives structured the project. The first was to examine, using electroencephalography (EEG), whether social observation modifies moral preferences and the neural processes underlying moral conflict. The second was to develop the Ecological Moral Dilemmas Stimulus Bank (EMDS), a new open-access scientific resource providing researchers with ecologically valid moral scenarios grounded in real-world content, rather than the hypothetical sacrificial dilemmas that currently dominate the field. The third was to investigate dyadic social interaction during moral decision-making using EEG hyperscanning — a technique enabling the simultaneous recording of brain activity from multiple individuals — in order to examine the neural and behavioural dynamics of collective moral deliberation. Together, these objectives reflect a commitment to advancing the scientific understanding of moral cognition under conditions that more realistically approximate the social complexity of real human life.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз

Цел на проекта

In our modern societies, moral situations often refer to saving, hurting, condemning, or sparing peers. The direction of our moral preferences (e.g., utilitarian, deontological) is inherently shaped by social norms and social context. However, current experimental research on moral cognition suffers from two main limitations. First, while a wealth of research has examined individual’s moral preferences in single settings, no research to our knowledge has examined individual’s moral preferences in real-life social settings. Second, because of the long-standing paradigm involving the use of hypothetical and sacrificial dilemmas to measure decision-making (i.e., save or sacrifice lives), we assume there is a discrepancy between hypothetical and realistic moral decision-making. Compared to the current state-of-the-art, YourMORALS will allow for the first time to assess the role of social presence on individual’s moral preferences, shedding light on both cognitive and neural processes underlying responses to realistic scenarios. This research will combine behavioural and neurophysiological paradigms by using a unique experimental system allowing to mimic social context through dyadic interactions. The proposed experiments will permit to clarify the role of social presence through, 1) indirect exposition to other’s moral choices (single setting), 2) direct presence of other (social setting). The latest innovative EEG-based hyperscanning techniques will be used to measure multiple brains’ activity. We will also construct an open, standardized and realistic moral dilemmas dataset. As well as opening new perspectives in social neuroscience and psychology, this project will add theoretical and methodological expertise to my skill-set by providing the most suitable research environment for my career development, at the Moral and Social Brain Lab, in one of the top-ranking universities of Europe (Ghent University), under Prof. Emilie Caspar supervision.

Оригинален текст от CORDIS (на английски).

Участници

UNIVERSITEIT GENT · GentКоординаторБелгия