Time, ethics and the brain: Understanding the Behavioral and Neural Effects of Temporal-Discounting on Moral-Conflict Decisions

Moral-conflicts arise when individuals need to decide whether to perform actions that benefit themselves, yet at the price of possibly hurting others.

The effects of temporal-delays in the outcomes of these decisions are critical, as real-life consequences often unfold over varying timeframes in everyday life, as well as in public-policy, healthcare and economic decisions.

While temporal lags are known to affect subjective reward valuation, their effects on moral decisions with conflicting self-benefit and harm-to-others outcomes, remain unexplored.

This project will investigate how individuals assign subjective value to delayed outcomes in such conflicts, focusing on the behavioural and cognitive biases that arise due to temporal-discounting, and aim to uncover the neural mechanisms underlying them.

Participants will perform moral-decisions, choosing between small self-monetary rewards associated with an unpainful small shock to another individual, to a larger self-reward coupled with a more intense shock to the other, with varied time-delays in the different outcomes.

By combining behavioural, fMRI and physiological methods, and integrating them with computational modelling approaches, we will obtain a comprehensive picture of the neurocomputational effects of temporal-discounting in this context, aiming to explain and predict individuals decisions in single-trials.

By revealing the effects of temporal-discounting on moral decisions, this project will offer insights for social neuroscience, psychology and neuro-economics, and real-life implications for everyday decision-making, as well as for long-term, high-impact decisions by policymakers.

The project will be performed at the Social Brain Lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, supervised by Prof C. Keysers and V.

Gazzola, world-leading experts in social neuroscience, ensuring I will develop novel theoretical and methodological skills, having a valuable impact on my training and career advancement.