Vicarious Punishment of Moral Violations in Naturalistic Drama Narratives Predicts Cortical Synchronization

Punishment of moral norm violators is instrumental for human cooperation. Yet, social and affective neuroscience research has primarily focused on second- and third-party norm enforcement, neglecting the neural architecture underlying observed (vicarious) punishment of moral wrongdoers. We used naturalistic television drama as a sampling space for observing outcomes of morally-relevant behaviors to assess how individuals cognitively process dynamically evolving moral actions and their consequences. Drawing on Affective Disposition Theory, we derive hypotheses linking character morality with viewers’ neural processing of characters’ rewards and punishments. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine neural responses of 28 female participants while free-viewing 15 short story summary video clips of episodes from a popular US television soap opera. Each summary included a complete narrative structure, fully crossing main character behaviors (moral/immoral) and the consequences (reward/punishment) characters faced for their actions. Narrative engagement was examined via intersubject correlation and representational similarity analysis. Highest cortical synchronization in 9 specifically selected regions previously implicated in processing moral information was observed when characters who act immorally are punished for their actions with participants’ empathy as an important moderator. The results advance our understanding of the moral brain and the role of normative considerations and character outcomes in viewers’ engagement with popular narratives.

道德规范违反者的惩罚对于人类的合作具有工具性。然而，社会和情感神经科学研究主要集中于第二和第三方的规范执行，忽视了道德违规者所遭受的（间接的）惩罚背后的神经架构。本研究利用自然主义的电视戏剧作为样本空间，观察与道德相关行为的后果，以评估个体如何认知地处理动态演变的道德行为及其结果。基于情感倾向理论，我们提出了将角色道德与观众对角色奖惩的神经处理相联系的理论假设。我们运用功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）技术，对28位女性参与者观看15部来自流行美国电视肥皂剧的短篇故事概要视频片段时的神经反应进行了研究。每个概要均包含完整的叙事结构，充分涵盖了主要角色的行为（道德/不道德）以及角色因行为而面临的后果（奖励/惩罚）。通过跨被试相关性和表征相似性分析，考察了叙事投入。当不道德的角色因行为受到惩罚时，观察到最高皮质同步性出现在9个先前被怀疑与道德信息处理相关的特定区域，其中参与者的同理心作为一个重要的调节因素。这些结果推进了我们对于道德大脑的理解，以及规范考虑和角色结果在观众与流行叙事互动中的作用的认知。