Can the body affect our morals? In the present study, we tested if motor system activation can change our moral decisions. Participants (N = 70) were presented with the choice to kill one person in order to save several lives. The action was described by means of hand (e.g., “push”) or foot (e.g., “kick”) verbs. As a secondary task, they moved rhythmically either their hands or their feet. Participants refused to act more often in both hand and foot dilemmas when they had been moving the same effector. We propose that the repetitive rhythm activates motor areas, leading to a more detailed simulation of the harmful act, so making more difficult the decision to carry it out. These findings reveal that mundane activities of the body can affect our most elevated decisions and suggest a causal implication of the motor system in moral cognition.

A widely shared view on temporal representation suggests that people conceptualize time metaphorically as a spatial journey from a back (past) location to a front (future) location. This view predicts 1) shorter estimated distances to and better evaluations of front/future than back/past events (an asymmetry); 2) positive correlations between space, time, and evaluation; 3) negative correlations between responses to the front/future and the back/past. In the present study, participants performed a temporal distance task, a time discounting task, and a spatial distance task, all with back/past and front/future versions. Results showed that 1) there was not asymmetry between back/past and front/future in any task; 2) spatial and temporal tasks correlated positively, but they did not correlate with time discounting; and 3) responses toward the front/future and back/past correlated positively (and not negatively) in all three tasks. The results suggest the need to revise the "moving forward view of time".

In a preregistered experiment, we tested whether interfering with primary motor cortex (M1) activation can change how people construe meaning from language. Participants were presented with sentences describing motor actions and asked to choose between a concrete and an abstract interpretation of their meaning. Prior to this task, participants' M1 was disrupted using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). The results suggested strong evidence against the idea that M1-rTMS affects meaning construction. Additional analyses and experiments suggest that the absence of effect cannot be accounted for by failure to inhibit M1, lack of task validity, or lack of power to detect a small effect. These results do not support a causal role for primary motor cortex in building meaning from action language.