14 DAY TRIAL // As people age, their responses to moral issues change, a new study shows. The research confirms that the human brain is changing its neural circuitry to underlie this transition. The new study was conducted by experts at the University of Chicago (UC).
What the team here found was that the same situations caused different moral responses in people of different ages. However, the responses were uniform throughout similar age groups, the experts say.
In order to conduct the new study, the UC group used a combination of brain scanning technology, behavioral measures and eye-tracking methods. This allowed them to understand the reactions of the brain in such circumstances in more detail than ever before.
Usually, when peers need to decide whether someone did a bad thing, they tend to take into account whether the damage was done intentionally or by accident. Children and adults alike exhibit the same thought pattern in this regard, EurekAlert reports.
The difference between the two groups is that adults are much less likely to seek someone's punishment for damaging an object. The correlation is even less strong if the object is damaged unintentionally.
There is a clear connection between the various stages of brain development, age and the response test subjects give to moral-laden situations, explains the UC Irving B. Harris professor in psychology and psychiatry Jean Decety.
The expert is the author of a new paper detailing the findings, as well as a leading scholar on affective and social neuroscience. With age, she says, the brain becomes capable of carrying out more complex judgments that are off-limits to children.
People also learn to integrate a more advanced type of understanding of the mental states of others, and connect this to the outcome of their actions, as well as with specific situations, at least as far as morality is concerned.
“This is the first study to examine brain and behavior relationships in response to moral and non-moral situations from a neurodevelopmental perspective,” Decety wrote in the new journal entry.
The article, entitled “The Contribution of Emotion and Cognition to Moral Sensitivity: A Neurodevelopmental Study,” appears in the latest issue of the scientific journal Cerebral Cortex
“Whereas young children had a tendency to consider all the perpetrator malicious, irrespective of intention and targets (people and objects), as participants aged, they perceived the perpetrator as clearly less mean when carrying out an accidental action, and even more so when the target was an object,” she concludes.