PsyPost reports:

A new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience suggests that people who are more attuned to their internal bodily sensations are also more likely to make moral decisions that align with the values of the broader group. The researchers found that individuals with greater interoceptive awareness—how accurately they can perceive their own bodily signals—tended to choose responses in moral dilemmas that matched the majority’s preferences. Brain imaging revealed that this connection may be supported by resting-state activity in specific brain regions involved in self-reflection and internal signal monitoring.

The researchers were interested in understanding why people so often make moral decisions that match the expectations of those around them, even when no explicit social pressure is present. Past theories have suggested that aligning with social norms helps conserve energy by minimizing social conflict, which in turn supports survival. The research team hypothesized that people who are better at sensing internal signals might use that information to more efficiently model others’ expectations and align their decisions accordingly.

“When people behave in ways that conflict with others’ expectations in social situations, it can easily lead to interpersonal conflict, and resolving this conflict may increase the use of physical resources,” said study author Hackjin Kim, a professor at Korea University and director of the Laboratory of Social and Decision Neuroscience.

“Recent theories (Constant et al., 2019; Theriault et al., 2021) suggest that our brains are designed to minimize physical resource consumption while maintaining survival. One way to do this is to learn others’ expectations to avoid social conflict. This strategy may ultimately be an important social adaptation skill that enhances survival. Based on this hypothesis, we predicted that if moral intuition is fundamentally based on the brain’s principle of minimizing bodily resource expenditure by learning others’ expectations, then individuals with better body-brain communication would more effectively adjust their moral intuitions by learning others’ expectations. Our findings provide the first evidence supporting this hypothesis.” [Continue reading…]