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The Right and The Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency| old_uid | 3619 |
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| title | The Right and The Good: Distributive Justice and Neural Encoding of Equity and Efficiency |
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| start_date | 2007/12/07 |
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| schedule | 10h |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Distributive justice is concerned with how individuals and societies allocate benefits and burdens in a just or moral manner. Such questions have been at the intersection of moral and political philosophy since at least the time of Plato and Aristotle and are central to social choice theory, moral psychology, and welfare economics. Despite the long history of work on distributive justice, however, its psychological and neural underpinnings remain poorly understood. We contribute to this literature by studying neural encodings of equity and efficiency. Unlike previous experiments in distributive justice and related areas such as moral cognition, our task (i) employs real consequences, (ii) partitions the temporal ordering of decisions, and (iii) parametrically modulate relative equity and efficiency of the outcomes.
Behaviorally, we estimated the level of subjects' inequity aversion using their choices, under the assumption that subjects tradeoff between efficiency and equity linearly. fMRI data showed that putamen is the unique region significantly correlated with efficiency, whereas the insula encodes for relative equity levels. Finally, the caudate head is unique region that is significantly correlated with both equity and efficiency. Furthermore, activity in the insula and caudate head are significantly correlated with the behavioral inequity aversion parameter. These results show that the neural mechanism of moral decision-making has important commonalities and differences with those involved in individual and interpersonal decision-making. |
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| responsibles | Bourgeois-Gironde |
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