UC Santa Barbara

In daily life, moral judgments are embedded in dynamic, complex, and contextualized environments. As we reason about morally right or wrong behaviors, our personal history shapes how we judge who did what to whom, where, when, and why. Yet, surprisingly little is known about how individual differences in moral dispositions modulate shared neural response patterns when processing increasingly complex moral scenarios. Consequently, we herein examine brain-behavior-trait coherence in moral cognition across three datasets of increasing naturalistic complexity. Applying intersubject representational similarity analysis, we demonstrate how between-subject variability in moral dispositions modulates similarity in neural responses when processing decontextualized moral vignettes, auditory movie summaries, political attack advertisement, soap opera clips, and full-length movies. Our approach highlights how brain-behavior-trait relationships during moral cognition are shaped by paradigm choice, and provides a reference for conducting research at the intersection of socio-moral cognition, communication science, and naturalistic neuroimaging.