The Neuroeconomics of Emotional Conflicts in Moral Dilemma Judgment.

We are accustomed to thinking of moral judgment as predominantly rational decision-making. But emotion is a key issue in decision-making because it emerged in nature as a tool for assessing how well an animal’s behavior adapts to its environment.

Neuroeconomics aims to ground economic models in the biological substrate of the brain for decision-making. Here we use neuroeconomic tools to model experimental results on Moral Dilemma Judgment and Voting Decisions on gun control. Our model involves an emotional component and a cognitive factor in estimating the expected utility of conflicting dilemma (voting) propositions. This conflict is the main component that determines the probability of decision-making.

The agreement between our experimental and theoretical distribution of response times seems to validate the proposed model. The EEG activity recorded during the dilemma judgment is also in agreement with our theoretical propositions. Our results contribute to making neuroeconomic models predictive and explanatory.