Sai Liyang, Wang Chongxiang, Lv Yating, Bellucci Gabriele
Department of Psychology, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China.
Zhejiang Philosophy and Social Science, Laboratory for Research in Early Development and Childcare, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China.
Commun Biol. 2025 Jun 10;8(1):906. doi: 10.1038/s42003-025-08256-9.
Confronted with the temptation to cheat, people do not only care about their personal benefits, but also consider whether they can justify their dishonest behavior. Previous research has shown how reward and justifications alone influence dishonest decisions. However, little is known about how they jointly guide dishonest behaviors and which neurocomputational mechanisms are involved. Here, we combined Bayesian computational modeling with neuroimaging techniques to investigate the neurocomputational processes underlying the weighting of justifications and personal benefits during moral decision-making. Using a perceptual decision-making task, we found that participants were more likely to be lured into dishonest choices by rewards (greater personal benefits) when perceptual ambiguity was higher (lying was more easily justifiable), and that individual, model-based weighting of perceptual ambiguity more strongly predicted participants' dishonesty. Model-based choice values correlated with neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) and bilateral anterior insula (AI), with left AI predicting honest choices. On the contrary, more dishonest behavior was associated with stronger functional connectivity between left AI and ventrolateral PFC. These results demonstrate how individuals integrate different aspects of moral behaviors, unifying various predictions of previous accounts on human morality.
面对作弊的诱惑时，人们不仅关心个人利益，还会考虑自己是否能为不诚实行为找到正当理由。先前的研究已经表明了奖励和正当理由如何单独影响不诚实决策。然而，对于它们如何共同引导不诚实行为以及涉及哪些神经计算机制，我们却知之甚少。在此，我们将贝叶斯计算建模与神经成像技术相结合，以研究道德决策过程中对正当理由和个人利益进行权衡时所涉及的神经计算过程。通过一项感知决策任务，我们发现当感知模糊性较高（说谎更容易找到正当理由）时，参与者更容易被奖励（更大的个人利益）诱使做出不诚实的选择，并且基于模型的个体对感知模糊性的权衡更能有力地预测参与者的不诚实行为。基于模型的选择价值与内侧前额叶皮层（PFC）和双侧前岛叶（AI）的神经活动相关，左侧AI可预测诚实选择。相反，更多的不诚实行为与左侧AI和腹外侧PFC之间更强的功能连接有关。这些结果表明了个体如何整合道德行为的不同方面，统一了先前关于人类道德的各种预测。
