HSD: Collaborative Research: Evolutionary, Developmental, and Neurobiological Sources of Moral Judgments

一个多学科研究团队将研究道德判断性质的各个方面以及跨文化变异和变革能力的因果因素。 该项目测量了不同时间段（进化，发展和文化）和不同测试人群（非人类动物，正常和神经生物学受损的人类婴儿和成人，以及不同文化）的道德决定的性质。 它对每种类型的研究使用不同的方法，包括灵长类动物实验，大规模互联网研究和患者的神经心理学调查。 研究人员将研究两个心理因素：（1）意图伤害他人作为实现更大利益的手段比仅仅作为预见的副作用伤害更不被允许的想法（意图原则）和（2）对他人造成伤害的行为将被视为道德上比造成同等伤害的行为的疏忽更糟糕的想法（疏忽原则）。 这些原则的研究将在非人类灵长类动物和人类婴儿中进行，以检验这些原则所必需的一些核心认知构建块（例如，感知意图和目标）已经存在，但只在我们自己的物种中具有道德意义，而且只在后来的儿童发展中。 研究人员将检验以下假设，即这些原则是普遍的，但在其具体内容中存在跨文化差异（例如，通过使用大规模的基于互联网的研究以及对狩猎采集和基于生存的社会的研究， 他们将检验这样一个假设：政府可以强制实施明确的法律来改变人们的行为方式，但这些明确的规范并不能渗透人们直觉的道德判断。 研究人员还将研究神经损伤如何系统地改变患者群体中特定道德判断的性质（即，该项目预计将加强对人类如何进化出提供道德判断的能力，这种判断如何随着发展和跨文化而变化，以及这种能力如何在选择性神经损伤后崩溃的基本理解。 该项目的结果可能在司法、公共政策、教育和临床治疗领域有用，展示了人类带到道德桌上的生物和心理机制，以及他们如何应对可能与其直觉道德感不一致的政策。 该项目还将为研究生提供教育和培训机会，包括来自少数群体和发展中国家的学生。

A multidisciplinary research team will study various aspects of the nature of moral judgments and the causal factors for the capacity for cross-cultural variation and change. The project measures the nature of moral decisions across different time periods (evolutionary, developmental, and cultural) and among different test populations (nonhuman animals, normal and neurobiologically impaired human infants and adults, and different cultures). It uses different methods for each type of study including experiments of primates, large-scale internet studies, and neuropsychological investigation of patients. The investigators will to study two psychological factors: (1) The idea that intending to harm another as a means to the greater good is less permissible than harming merely as a foreseen side effect (the intention principle) and (2) The idea that acts that cause harm to others will be perceived as morally worse than omissions of an act that causes equivalent harm (the omission principle). Studies of these principles will be conducted with nonhuman primates and human infants to test the hypothesis that some of the core cognitive building blocks that are necessary for these principles (e.g., perceiving intentions and goals) are in place but only take on moral significance in our own species, and only later in child development. The investigators will test the hypothesis that these principles are universal but with cross-cultural variation in their specific content (e.g., who can be harmed) by using both large-scale internet-based studies as well as studies of hunter-gather and subsistence-based societies. They will test the hypothesis that governments can impose explicit laws that alter how people behave yet these explicit norms do not penetrate people's intuitive moral judgments. The investigators also will examine how neural insult systematically changes the nature of particular moral judgments among patient populations (i.e., autistics, individuals with damage to the frontal lobes and amygdala).The project is expected to enhance basic understanding of how humans evolved the capacity to deliver moral judgments, how such judgments change over development and across cultures, and how the capacity breaks down following selective neural insult. Results from this project are likely to be useful in the arenas of justice, public policy, education, and clinical treatment, showcasing the biological and psychological mechanisms that humans bring to the moral table, and how they respond to policy that may be at odds with their intuitive moral sense. The project also will provide education and training opportunities for graduate students, including students from minority groups and developing nations.