Neural correlates of moral vs. immoral behavior in group contexts

Moral behavior is an important factor in social evaluation, particularly in
group contexts. People want to connect the self to groups (Leach, Ellemers, &
Barreto, 2007) or organizations (Ellemers, et al., in press) that seem moral,
and are motivated to display behavior that is seen as moral as a way to secure
inclusion in the group (Ellemers, Pagliaro, Barreto & Leach, 2008). Due to the
desire to self-present as a moral person to important others, conventional
(self-report) measures make it difficult to assess the underlying processes
(e.g., experience of threat, motivation to suppress immoral behavior) relevant
to these responses. The proposed research aims to assess motivational and
cognitive processes associated with the social implications of morality more
directly and continuously, by examining brain activity associated with moral
vs. immoral behavior in group contexts. Importantly, this project thus focuses
on the neural correlates of moral behavior, rather than moral reasoning which
has been studied more extensively in previous research (for a review see Moll,
Zahn, De Oliviera-Souza, Krueger, & Grafman, 2005) and it includes moral
behavior in group contexts.

The main objective of this project is to examine the neural correlates of the
motivation to be moral in group contexts. We will address three related issues:
how the desire to be seen as moral affects people*s self-views and motivation
to display behavior attesting to their morality and what brain activation is
associated with this motivation (study 1), how they respond to feedback from
ingroup vs. outgroup members regarding their own moral behavior and what brain
activation is associated with this feedback (study 2), and how they respond to
the moral vs. immoral behavior displayed by other ingroup vs. outgroup members
- depending on how they think this reflects on the self - and what brain
activation is associated with the reaction to that behavior (study 3).

In the three studies of this project an experimental design is used.
Participants will perform an Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, &
Schwartz, 1998) and we will measure brain activation using functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (fMRI) while they are performing the task.
In the Implicit Association Test (IAT), two target concepts are associated with
two attributes. The two target concepts in this study consist of female faces
with headscarves (i.e., resembling out-group members) and female faces without
headscarves (i.e., in-group members). Attributes consist of positive and
negative pictures. During the test, participants learn to press a left or
right key for each type of picture. In the congruent condition, female faces
without a headscarf are associated with positive pictures (i.e, these types of
pictures are assigned to the same key respons) and female faces with a
headscarf are associated with negative pictures. In the incongruent condition
female faces without a headscarf are associated with negative pictures, and
female faces with a headscarf are associated with positive pictures. Because
females without headscraves are expected to resemble in-group members, it is
expected that participants show a negative bias in the incongruent condition
(i.e., more errors and greater reaction times on trials in this condition),
because people tend to be more positive towards their in-group members than
towards out-group members (i.e., ingroup favoritsm). Moreover, because we are
interested in the motivation to be moral, we add an instruction to the implicit
association test in which either the moral implications or implications
concerning competence are emphasized: in the introduction of the IAT,
participants are either told that the test measures their values concerning
equal treatment of and discrimination against groups (morality instruction) or
that the test measures how precise they are in sorting pictures and how well
they are able to process new information (competence instruction).
The IAT with two types of instructions will be used in all three studies.
However, feedback given by an ingroup or outgroup member is included in study
2, and in study 3, participants are not performing the task themselves. Instead
they observe and are asked to respond to an ingroup or outgroup member*s
performance on the task.

There are no risks concerning this research project.