By: Carly Pontifex
Neuroscience Graduate Student
The spectrum of human morality has driven the development of social systems and the evolution of civilization. Although the standard for morality deviates across time and culture, there have always been those that rigorously adhere to social conventions at the expense of their own well-being, and those that have no problem defying conventions if it is to their own benefit. In prose, poetry, and religion this dynamic entanglement between saint and sadist has set the stage for the battle between good and evil, which assumes the existence of free will. Insights from neuroscience highlight the highway between two destinations in the brain that guide moral action; the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and the amygdala.
In the central depths of your brain sits the almond shaped amygdala. The amygdala is also responsible for reinforcement of learning. This is particularly important in social and behavioural learning. Witnessing an expression of fear or anger on another person’s face activates the amygdala, and this is essential for emotional learning. If you hit your brother or sister, your amygdala will respond to the crying and tears of your sibling and the look of fear and anger on the face of your parents. You have committed a social transgression and this is unacceptable according to the rules of your parents and society at large.
On the one hand, we have the amygdala which is essential to recognize the human cue that we have committed a social faux pas, and at the vmPFC we have the region that teaches us through learning that such social errors will lead to consequences we’d be better off avoiding. We learn that if we hit our sibling we won’t get that toy we desperately want or we won't get to go to our best friend's birthday party. In the future we will think before we act impulsively and we learn to anticipate that we will be punished if we get caught. Once learned, we develop a sense of regret and guilt if we hurt someone or make a mistake that effects another person. The connection between these two brain regions acts like a feedback loop. A bad action is associated with social cues (facial expression and tone of voice) and a negative consequence, learning to anticipate this in the future is followed by an increased responsiveness to social cues.
Aberrations in the connectivity between these two regions of the brain give rise to fascinating and sometimes detrimental manifestations of human behavior. Excessive activation or connectivity may lead to anxiety and depressive disorders. If you experience hyperactivity of the vmPFC-amygdala you may notice a disgruntled look on a colleague's face and worry or imagine that they were thinking badly of you. You might ruminate for days on end that you accidentally said something offensive and feel mortified every time they walk into the room. You might feel constantly preoccupied with shame and distress. You might isolate yourself and become consumed with depression and cyclical thoughts that tell you how worthless and stupid you are. Conversely, reduced connectivity between the amygdala and vmPFC gives rise to psychopathy.
Scientists have measured the relationship between vmPFC-amygdala activity and decision making behaviors. They have noted that the psychopath doesn’t respond to social or facial cues as the activity in the amygdala is dampened. If you fail to recognize and integrate that your social conduct is considered unacceptable at the amygdala, you may fail to send the signal to the vmPFC to initiate learning and reinforcement necessary to avoid future negative consequences. The amygdala fails to tell the psychopath that they should be afraid, which is suggested by reduced amygdala activity when they are told to anticipate an electric shock. Ultimately a psychopath may become blinded to only seeing the positive outcome of a bad action. For example if they steal, they get something for free, without much consideration that they caused harm to the person they stole from, and they just aren’t very afraid of the consequences if they happen to get caught. Thus, there are measurable differences in decision making patterns of people with psychopathy.
Differences in decision making can be tested with the Iowa gambling task, where participants are told to select a card from one of two decks to earn money. One deck is rigged to have better cards for payouts and the second deck provides fewer payouts. Eventually, participants will identify the good deck and pick mainly from that deck. When the good and bad decks are switched the participants with dysfunction continue to pick the old deck of cards in spite of losing money. A psychopath can learn that a particular action will lead to a favorable outcome, but when faced with undesirable outcomes they struggle to adapt their behavior. A psychopath might get away with stealing multiple times, but will likely continue stealing even if they are caught many times over.
For better, or for worse, the variability in human morality exists on a continuum. From the extremely empathetic that may become so distressed by their perceived actions that they take their own life, to the violent psychopath that thinks nothing of taking the life of another person. Although not all psychopaths are necessarily violent, population rates for psychopathy make up roughly 1% of the general population and up to 25% of the prison population. When criminal offenders were monitored for 5 and a half years after release, 40% of non psychopaths and 85% of psychopaths ended up reoffending within that time frame. Many non-violent psychopaths make up a higher proportion of people in prominent and influential positions, such as politicians, surgeons, journalists, CEOs, lawyers and media personalities, and the actions of a conscious-free power elite may have an immeasurable impact on our world.
The heroes of our stories are noble and self-sacrificing, and the villains are driven by greed and a desire for power. In our stories these ancient archetypes use their free will to behave either benevolently or malevolently. However, our brains suggest that there are limits to free will. A psychopath is driven only by their desire to thrive at the expense of all other things, from an evolutionary perspective this is a perfectly logical survival strategy. In many ways a conscience can be a great burden to the individual, even while it can be a great boon to society. While there are effective treatments for individuals that experience anxiety and depression, there is no effective treatment for the psychopath, but if there were, how might that change the world we are living in and the future of human civilization? If there was a way to restore the conscience to the part of humanity that lacks it, would there be less war, murder, rape and human trafficking? For now, we can only imagine what that world might look like.
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2606709/
https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/comments/S1364-6613(07)00191-X
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136466130700191X
https://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/16/4415
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15920-7
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2008/06/26/not-all-psychopaths-are-criminal/
https://academic.oup.com/cercor/article/15/1/58/282755
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1394084