Brain meeting: Dr Molly Crockett

Brain meeting 

A central component of human morality is a prohibition against harming others. Nevertheless, sometimes people will inflict harm on others for their own personal gain. In this talk, I will present behavioural and neuroimaging studies investigating two questions: first, how do people decide whether or not to harm others instrumentally? And second, how do people learn to avoid actions that harm others? Our studies of moral decision-making show that value computation in moral decision-making engages a fronto-striatal network, with lateral prefrontal cortex encoding the blameworthiness of harmful decisions, and caudate showing reduced responses to ill-gotten gains. When people are learning to avoid actions that harm others, they prioritize model-free over model-based learning, and model-free prediction errors distinguish harmful outcomes from neutral outcomes in the thalamus and caudate. Finally, multiple behavioural and neural correlates of model-free moral learning vary with individual differences in moral judgment. Our findings suggest moral learning favours efficiency over flexibility and is underpinned by specific neural mechanisms.

There will be coffee, tea and cake in the conservatory directly after the talk.