Moral judgment, a fundamental aspect of human behavior, involves evaluativedistinctions between actions deemed morally "good" or "bad." This dissertation delves into
the cognitive and neurological processes underpinning moral judgment by examining two
influential theoretical frameworks: Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and
Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC). MFT posits innate moral foundations (e.g., harm, fairness,
loyalty) as the basis of morality, while MAC focuses on moral elements (e.g., helping kin,
fairness) emerging from cooperation challenges. Despite the pervasive influence of morality
research on communication and media content, particularly in areas like moralizing language
on social media and persuasion strategies using moral framing, a comprehensive comparison
of the neurological underpinnings across these theories has been lacking in the literature. The
dissertation reveals neural networks related to the theory of mind to be associated with moral
cognition across the two theories. However, it also reveals that the neural representation for
each moral foundation and element exhibits distinct patterns. The factorization of neural
representations of MFT and MAC provides robust evidence for the theoretical foundations of
both frameworks, emphasizing the theoretical overlap of moral domains across the two
theories. Moreover, different survey measures for moral sensitivity yield variations in
predicting the neural representation of moral cognition, illustrating how a neuroscientific
approach can offer additional validations of survey measures.This dissertation offers a
nuanced understanding of moral cognition, revealing the complexity of neural
representations associated with different moral foundations and elements from two
competing theories of moral cognition.