Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic
identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions
in life, and individuals typically resist attempts
to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits.
Deontological
theory suggests that sacred values are processed
based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian
theory
suggests that they are processed based on costs and
benefits of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an
individual
naturally uses is unknown. The study of decisions
over sacred values is difficult because outcomes cannot typically be
realized
in a laboratory, and hence little is known about
the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We used an
experimental
paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for
sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their
personal
values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred
values)
were associated with increased activity in the left
temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions
previously associated with semantic rule retrieval.
This suggests that sacred values affect behaviour through the retrieval
and processing of deontic rules and not through a
utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.
In short, when people didn’t sell out their principles, it wasn’t
because the price wasn’t right. It just seemed wrong. “There’s one
bucket of things that are utilitarian, and another bucket of categorical
things,” Berns said. “If it’s a sacred value to you, then you can’t
even conceive of it in a cost-benefit framework.”
According to Berns, the implications could help people better
understand the motivations of others. He’s now studying how moral
equations change according to the social popularity of values, and what
happens in the brain when deep-seated principles are confronted with
reasoned arguments.
-----
Berns, G.S., et al. (2012). The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 367: 754-762. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0262
No comments:
Post a Comment