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Moral foundations elicit shared and dissociable cortical activation modulated by political ideology

Nature Human Behaviour volume 7, pages 2182–2198 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Moral foundations theory (MFT) holds that moral judgements are driven by modular and ideologically variable moral foundations but where and how these foundations are represented in the brain and shaped by political beliefs remains an open question. Using a moral vignette judgement task (n = 64), we probed the neural (dis)unity of moral foundations. Univariate analyses revealed that moral judgement of moral foundations, versus conventional norms, reliably recruits core areas implicated in theory of mind. Yet, multivariate pattern analysis demonstrated that each moral foundation elicits dissociable neural representations distributed throughout the cortex. As predicted by MFT, individuals’ liberal or conservative orientation modulated neural responses to moral foundations. Our results confirm that each moral foundation recruits domain-general mechanisms of social cognition but also has a dissociable neural signature malleable by sociomoral experience. We discuss these findings in view of unified versus dissociable accounts of morality and their neurological support for MFT.

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Fig. 1: Moral judgement task and behavioural results.
Fig. 2: Results of whole-brain univariate analyses.
Fig. 3: Multivoxel pattern classification of MFVs.
Fig. 4: Cross-decoding of moral wrongness ratings.
Fig. 5: Neural representational mapping of moral foundations.
Fig. 6: Ability of each candidate RDM to predict reference RDMs.
Fig. 7: Political ideology shapes processing of moral foundations.

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Data availability

The behavioural data that support the findings of this study as well as the Supplemental Information and experimental stimuli are available at The Open Science Framework platform (https://osf.io/dfmu6/). The meta-analytic map associated with the term ‘moral’ can be retrieved from neurosynth: https://www.neurosynth.org/analyses/terms/moral/. ROI were selected from a parcellation created using a whole-brain parcellation based on meta-analytic functional co-activation of the neurosynth database (parcellation available at https://neurovault.org/images/395092/). MRI data are available upon request. Our IRB approval states that these data can be shared for the purpose of reproducing or extending our results by researchers who agree to participant protection and privacy stipulations.

Code availability

All custom code required to reproduce the results in this paper can be found at https://github.com/medianeuroscience/mft_vignettes.

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Acknowledgements

F.R.H. was supported by a George D. McCune Dissertation fellowship, Department of Communication, University of California Santa Barbara. R.W. acquired funding from the Army Research Lab, grant no. W911NF-15-2-0115. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Frederic R. Hopp

  2. Pomona College, Claremont, CA, USA

    Ori Amir

  3. Department of Communication, Michigan State University, Lansing, MI, USA

    Jacob T. Fisher

  4. Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    Scott Grafton & René Weber

  5. Department of Philosophy, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Walter Sinnott-Armstrong

  6. Department of Communication, Media Neuroscience Lab, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

    René Weber

  7. School of Communication and Media, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea

    René Weber

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Contributions

F.R.H., O.A., S.G., W.S.A. and R.W. conceived of this work. F.R.H., J.T.F. and R.W. undertook data curation. O.A. and R.W. conducted the investigation. F.R.H. and R.W. did the formal analysis. F.R.H. produced the visualizations. O.A., J.T.F. and R.W. were responsible for validation. R.W. undertook supervision, project administration and funding acquisition. F.R.H. wrote the original paper. O.A., J.T.F., S.G., W.S.A. and R.W. reviewed and edited the final paper.

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Correspondence to René Weber.

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Hopp, F.R., Amir, O., Fisher, J.T. et al. Moral foundations elicit shared and dissociable cortical activation modulated by political ideology. Nat Hum Behav 7, 2182–2198 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01693-8

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