Jean Decety

University of Chicago | UC · Department of Psychology and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience

Human social existence is characterized by an intuitive sense of fairness, concern for others, and the observance of cultural norms. This prosocial sensitivity is the foundation for adult morality, emanating from the sophisticated integration of emotional, motivational, and cognitive mechanisms across development. In this article, we discuss how an...

While it is well established that individuals with psychopathy have a marked deficit in affective arousal, emotional empathy, and caring for the well-being of others, the extent to which perspective taking can elicit an emotional response has not yet been studied despite its potential application in rehabilitation. In healthy individuals, affective...

Neuroscience research indicates that moral reasoning is underpinned by distinct neural networks including the posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS), amygdala, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which support communication between computational systems underlying the affective states, cognitions, and motivational processes. To characterize real...

The ontogeny of human empathy is better understood with reference to the evolutionary history of the social brain. Empathy has deep evolutionary, biochemical, and neurological underpinnings. Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication...

Empathy dysfunction is one of the core characteristics of youth with callous-unemotional (CU) traits. How such a dysfunction is associated with abnormal neural processing, however, remains to be determined. This study combined assessment of Hare Psychopathy Checklist Youth Version, pressure pain threshold, and event-related brain potentials elicite...

The Islamist group ISIS has been particularly successful at recruiting Westerners as terrorists. A hypothesized explanation is their simultaneous use of two types of propaganda: Heroic narratives, emphasizing individual glory, alongside Social narratives, which emphasize oppression against Islamic communities. Functional MRI was used to measure bra...

This study presents an identity-centered narrative theory of high-risk political activism to explain how narratives engage with social identities, and how variation in narratives can be strategically deployed by political actors to engage different mobilization pools. Narratives are stories that persuade through identification with plot and charact...

Why do some individuals engage in high-risk mobilization in support of foreign militant groups, willingly sacrificing their possessions and even their lives as “martyrs”, when there is no imminent threat to the community within which they live or strong ties to the communities for which they sacrifice? We develop a new theory of high-risk mobilizat...

Veterinarian work may take an emotional toll on practitioners and their mental health, potentially driving premature exit from the profession. Performing animal euthanasia is frequently identified as a potential risk factor for sustainable mental health. Yet, research has demonstrated mixed results between euthanasia performance and detrimental men...

Studies have documented associations between traumatic brain injury (TBI) and mental disorders. The relationship between psychopathic personality and TBI remains poorly understood, though both are associated with similar characteristics (e.g., low empathy, aggression, disturbances in social/moral behavior). Yet, it is not clear whether assessment o...

Moral preferences may have evolved as an adaptation to the socio-ecological challenges faced by our ancestors. These individuals lived in environments where social cooperation and the upholding of social norms were directly correlated with increased rates of survival and expansion, thereby allowing prosocial motivations to proliferate to future gen...

Overview Natural selection has equipped the human brain with a set of innate predispositions that motivate us to be social, cooperative, and altruistic. These predispositions also provide the criteria by which we evaluate the behavior of others. Prosociality encompasses many distinct motivations, proximate mechanisms, and behaviors, which together...

Prior work has documented considerable diversity among health practitioners regarding their support for voluntary assisted dying (VAD). We examined whether their attitudes are characterised by different combinations of personal support, normative support by other health practitioners, and whether they are predisposed to vicariously experience other...

Individuals with acute and chronic traumatic brain injury (TBI) are associated with unique white matter (WM) structural abnormalities, including fractional anisotropy (FA) differences. Our research group previously used FA as a feature in a linear support vector machine (SVM) pattern classifier, observing high classification between individuals wit...

Background: Although social cognition is compromised in patients with neurodegenerative disorders such as behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), research on moral emotions and their neural correlates in these populations is scarce. No previous study has explored the utility of moral emotions, compared to a...

Men with elevated psychopathic traits have been characterized by unique patterns of nonverbal communication, including more fixed and focused head positions during clinical interviews, compared to men scoring low on measures of psychopathy. However, it is unclear whether similar patterns of head dynamics help characterize women scoring high on psyc...

Network analysis is an emerging field for the study of psychopathology that considers constructs as arising from the interactions among their constituents. Pairwise effects among psychological components are often investigated by using this framework. Few studies have applied Bayesian networks, models that include directed interactions to perform c...

A narrative systematic review was conducted to review studies that examine mental health implications of involvement in assisted-death services among health practitioners. Qualitative and quantitative studies were included to understand health practitioners’ attitudes and experiences with assisted dying services, as well as to identify the mental h...

Both men and women scoring high on psychopathy exhibit similar structural and functional neural abnormalities, including reduced volume of the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and reduced hemodynamic activity in the amygdala during affective processing experimental paradigms. The uncinate fasciculus (UF) is a white matter (WM) tract that connects the amy...

Background Spontaneous cessation and reduction in smoking by pregnant women suggest that concern about others, or empathy, could be a malleable target for intervention. We examined various empathy-related processes in relations to reported and biochemically assessed smoking during pregnancy. Methods Participants were 154 pregnant women (M = 12.4 w...

The ability to share and understand the distress of others is critical for successful social interactions and is a fundamental building block of morality. Psychopathy is a personality disorder that includes lack of empathy and concern for others. In the present study, functional MRI was used to examine neural responses and functional connectivity a...

Moral conviction has the potential to inspire activism and change, but can also instigate divisiveness and great harm. Moreover, attitudes held with moral conviction are experienced as universal objective truths and are less likely to demonstrate social conformity. Some evidence suggests that holding strong moral views may be a consequence of a cog...

Previous studies with men suggest that certain psychopathic traits vary with age. Specifically, younger men score higher on psychopathic traits measuring impulsive-antisocial behavior, including impulsivity, irresponsibility, and criminal versatility, compared to older men. On the other hand, younger and older men score comparably on psychopathic t...

Identity, injustice, and group efficacy are key motivations for collective action engagement. However, little work has examined factors that influence their emergence. Across 3 studies (Total N = 938), we test whether exposure to different actions (i.e., radical or conventional) and the perceived legitimacy and efficacy of those actions (“the means...

Middle childhood seems to be crucial for the emergence of a moral identity, that is, an evaluative stance of how important it is for someone's sense of self to be moral. This study investigates the effects of moral identity on the neural processing of moral content in 10-year-old children. Participants were presented with scenes portraying prosocia...

Emotional intelligence (EI) is defined by the ability to perceive, manage, and reason about emotions in oneself and others. Studies have reported deficits in EI abilities among certain antisocial populations such as individuals with psychopathy, and enhanced performance among sexual offenders. Despite EI's relevance to offending behaviour, the asso...

Empathy reflects the ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, often eliciting a motivation to care for their well-being. It plays a central role in prosocial behavior and inhibition of aggression. While the development of empathy has traditionally been examined with behavioral and observational methods, a growing body...

One means by which humans maintain social cooperation is through intervention in third-party transgressions, a behaviour observable from the early years of development. While it has been argued that pre-school age children’s intervention behaviour is driven by normative understandings, there is scepticism regarding this claim. There is also little...

Previous studies have associated adult men with elevated psychopathic traits with reduced endorsement of certain moral foundations measured with the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), including Harm/Care (measuring one's concern for protecting individuals from harm) and Fairness/Reciprocity (measuring one's concern for the rights of individuals...

Although empathy drives prosocial behaviors, it is not always a reliable source of information in moral decision making. In this essay, I integrate evolutionary theory, behavioral economics, psychology, and social neuroscience to demonstrate why and how empathy is unconsciously and rapidly modulated by various social signals and situational factors...

Empathy reflects the ability to perceive and be sensitive to the emotional states of others, often associated with a motivation to care for their well-being. Empathy plays a pivotal role in motivating prosocial behavior. While the development of empathy has traditionally been examined with behavioral methods and observations, a growing body of work...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen that people can adapt quickly to ensure that their social needs are met after being forced to isolate and socially distance. Many individuals turned immediately to music, as evidenced by people singing from balconies, watching live concerts on social media, and group singing online. In this article, we sho...

Human social preferences are the product of gene-culture coevolution, and rely on predispositions that emerge early in development. These social preferences encompasse distinct motivations, mechanisms, and behaviors, that facilitate social cohesion and cooperation. Developmental social neuroscience critically contributes in elucidating the proximat...

This study examined individual influences on child empathy, the relationship between child and parent empathy, and the relationship between empathy and prosociality across seven countries. A large sample of children (N = 792, 49% female) from the ages of 6–10 years completed a situational empathy task, as well as a dictator game to assess prosocial...

Résumé L’empathie est un phénomène complexe dont la compréhension est améliorée par la distinction de ses dimensions émotionnelle, cognitive et motivationnelle, qui interagissent entre l’individu et son l’environnement dès le plus jeune âge. Des déficits précoces dans les processus empathiques peuvent conduire à des difficultés de socialisation qui...

To understand when, how, and why people cheat, the ability to detect cheating in a laboratory setting is crucial. However, commonly used paradigms are confronted with a conflict between allowing participants to believe they can cheat unnoticed and allowing experimenters to detect cheating. This project aimed to develop and establish a new nonverbal...

Much of social cognition requires making inferences about the mental and emotional states of others. Moreover, understanding the emotions of others is an important foundation for moral decision-making. Psychopathy is associated with both aberrant emotional understanding and atypical hemodynamic responses when viewing and evaluating morally laden so...

The identification of human violence determinants has sparked multiple questions from different academic fields. Innovative methodological assessments of the weight and interaction of multiple determinants are still required. Here, we examine multiple features potentially associated with confessed acts of violence in ex-members of illegal armed gro...

People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitic...

Social factors play a significant role in the health outcomes of those struggling with mental or physical health issues. People with mental illness experience more social stigmatization and receive less concern for their welfare than do those with physical illness. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms by which such a bias in attitude arises...

The Islamic State (ISIS) was uniquely effective among extremist groups in the Middle East at recruiting Westerners. A major way ISIS accomplished this was by adopting Hollywood-style narrative structures for their propaganda videos. In particular, ISIS utilized a heroic martyr narrative, which focuses on an individual’s personal glory and empowerme...

Homicide is a significant societal problem with economic costs in the billions of dollars annually and incalculable emotional impact on victims and society. Despite this high burden, we know very little about the neuroscience of individuals who commit homicide. Here we examine brain gray matter differences in incarcerated adult males who have commi...

Psychopathic individuals are notorious for their callous disregard for others' emotions. Prior research has linked psychopathy to deficits in affective mechanisms underlying empathy (e.g., affective sharing), yet research relating psychopathy to cognitive mechanisms underlying empathy (e.g., affective perspective-taking and Theory of Mind) requires...

People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitic...

A range of empirical and theoretical perspectives on the relationship between biology and social cognition from infancy through childhood. Recent research on the developmental origins of the social mind supports the view that social cognition is present early in infancy and childhood in surprisingly sophisticated forms. Developmental psychologists...

Forgiveness - a shift in motivation away from retaliation and avoidance towards increased goodwill for the perceived wrongdoer - is vital for restoring social relationships and positively impacts personal wellbeing and society at large. Parsing the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms of forgiveness contributes theoretical clarity, yet has...

One hallmark of human morality is a deep sense of fairness. People are motivated by both self-interest and a concern for the welfare of others. However, it remains unclear whether these motivations rely on similar neural computations, and the extent to which such computations influence social decision-making when self-fairness and other-fairness mo...

Expressions of emotion represent an important and unique source of information about the states of others. Being able to effectively understand expressions of emotions to make inferences about others' internal mental states and use these inferences to guide decision-making and behavior is critical to navigating social relationships. Loneliness, the...

Forgiveness-a shift in motivation away from retaliation and avoidance towards increased goodwill for the perceived wrongdoer-is vital for restoring social relationships and positively impacts personal wellbeing and society at large. Parsing the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms of forgiveness contributes theoretical clarity, yet has rema...

Résumé La psychopathie correspond à un cluster de traits de personnalité caractérisé par des symptômes de détachement émotionnel, un manque d’empathie, de culpabilité et de remords, une irresponsabilité, combinés à une propension à avoir des comportements impulsifs. Cet article évalue de façon critique la contribution de la neuro-imagerie anatomiqu...

Résumé L’empathie a bonne presse. Elle est reconnue pour avoir un impact positif dans la pratique clinique. Cependant, la profession médicale se débat pour parvenir à un équilibre entre la distance clinique et l’empathie. Trop de sensitivité aux émotions exprimées par les patients, sans régulation appropriée, peut conduire à de l’anxiété, au stress...

Humans are social beings, and acts of prosocial behavior may be influenced by social comparisons. To study the development of prosociality and the impact of social comparisons on sharing, we conducted experiments with nearly 2500 children aged 3-12 years across 12 countries across five continents. Children participated in a dictator game where they...

It is acknowledged that empathy plays a critical role in the physician-patient relationship and has a positive impact on health outcomes. However, as the field of empathy expands, the lack of conceptual coherence challenges advances in medicine. In fact, in some cases there is little added theoretical or clinical value in applying the all-encompass...

How does feeling hungry affect children's sharing and evaluations of others' moral decision making? To examine this question, we gave 4- to 9-year-old children the opportunity to share resources with an anonymous other child and to evaluate third-party resource allocation decisions between hungry and full recipients. We also measured children's sub...

The neuroscience of empathy is an active area of research that has led to fundamental contributions to our understanding of its cognitive mechanisms and neural circuitry. However, these contributions to knowledge do not constitute a new “brain-based ethics” or the like. Rather, we argue that, situated within an interdisciplinary neuroethics framewo...

Poster presented at the 38th Annual Conference for the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers; 2019 November 6-9; Atlanta, GA.

Psychopathy is a personality disorder defined by antisocial behavior paired with callousness, low empathy, and low interpersonal emotions. Psychopathic individuals reliably display complex atypicalities in emotion and attention processing that are evident when examining task performance, activation within specific neural regions, and connections be...

Humans are motivated by justice concerns, yet vary in their reactions to observing or experiencing injustice. At a proximate level, approach and avoidance represent core fundamental motivational systems which have been proposed to be involved in two independent moral systems: a prescriptive system responsive to obligations (“shoulds”) and a proscri...

There is extensive evidence of an association between early adversity and enduring neural changes that impact socioemotional processing throughout life. Yet little is known about the effects of on-going social discrimination on socioemotional functioning. Here we examined how cumulative experiences of social discrimination impact brain response dur...

There are many different ways that people can express their support for the animals that exist in factory farms. This study draws on insights from the social identity approach, and adopts novel methods (latent profile analysis [LPA]) to examine the qualitatively different subgroups or profiles that comprise broader community positions on this issue...

The ability to distinguish between mere equality in resource distributions and fairness based on a broader range of contextual factors is of paramount importance in social decision making and is a critical component of morality. Children's developmental shift from viewing inequality as a dichotomous moral issue toward a more nuanced understanding o...

Empathy is known to motivate prosocial behavior. This relationship, however, is complex and influenced by the social context and the type of prosocial behavior. Additionally, empathy is a complex psychological capacity, making it important to examine how different components influence different prosocial behaviors. The current study uses a unique l...

Studies have used resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) to examine associations between psychopathy and brain connectivity in selected regions of interest as well as networks covering the whole-brain. One of the limitations of these approaches is that brain connectivity is modeled as a constant state through the scan duratio...

Adults demonstrate aesthetic preferences for natural environments over urban ones. This preference has influenced theories like Biophilia to explain why nature is beneficial. While both adults and children show cognitive and affective benefits after nature exposure, it is unknown whether children demonstrate nature preferences. In the current study...

Poster presented at the 8th Biennial Conference for the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy; 2019 May 2-5; Las Vegas, NV.

Moral identity, or moral self, is the degree to which being moral is important to a person’s self-concept. It is hypothesized to be the “missing link” between moral judgment and moral action. However, its cognitive and psychophysiological mechanisms are still subject to debate. In this study, we used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to examine wheth...

Social interactions require the capacity to understand both our and other’s internal states. These semi-independent skills, the ability to understand oneself and others, seem to rely on the same type of representations and recruit similar brain areas. In this study, we looked at the neural basis of self and other processing in the context of an int...

Affective and Interpersonal Psychopathic Traits Associated with Reduced Corpus Callosum Volume among Male Inmates – Retraction - Nathaniel E. Anderson, J. Michael Maurer, Prashanth Nyalakanti, Keith A. Harenski, Carla L. Harenski, Michael R. Koenigs, Jean Decety, Kent A. Kiehl