Project description
How delayed consequences shape decisions
Every day, people face moral dilemmas where they must choose between personal gain and potentially harming others. These decisions often involve delayed consequences, making it harder to predict their impact. While it is known that time can alter the value of rewards, little is understood about how delays affect moral decision-making. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the TempMoralDecisions project aims to explore how time-lagged outcomes influence moral choices, focusing on the cognitive and behavioural biases at play. By combining behavioural experiments, fMRI, and computational modelling, the project will provide a deeper understanding of how temporal discounting shapes decisions, with insights that could impact psychology, neuroeconomics, and public policy.
Objective
Moral-conflicts arise when individuals need to decide whether to perform actions that benefit themselves, yet at the price of possibly hurting others. The effects of temporal-delays in the outcomes of these decisions are critical, as real-life consequences often unfold over varying timeframes in everyday life, as well as in public-policy, healthcare and economic decisions. While temporal lags are known to affect subjective reward valuation, their effects on moral decisions with conflicting self-benefit and harm-to-others outcomes, remain unexplored. This project will investigate how individuals assign subjective value to delayed outcomes in such conflicts, focusing on the behavioural and cognitive biases that arise due to temporal-discounting, and aim to uncover the neural mechanisms underlying them. Participants will perform moral-decisions, choosing between small self-monetary rewards associated with an unpainful small shock to another individual, to a larger self-reward coupled with a more intense shock to the other, with varied time-delays in the different outcomes. By combining behavioural, fMRI and physiological methods, and integrating them with computational modelling approaches, we will obtain a comprehensive picture of the neurocomputational effects of temporal-discounting in this context, aiming to explain and predict individuals decisions in single-trials. By revealing the effects of temporal-discounting on moral decisions, this project will offer insights for social neuroscience, psychology and neuro-economics, and real-life implications for everyday decision-making, as well as for long-term, high-impact decisions by policymakers. The project will be performed at the Social Brain Lab at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, supervised by Prof C. Keysers and V. Gazzola, world-leading experts in social neuroscience, ensuring I will develop novel theoretical and methodological skills, having a valuable impact on my training and career advancement.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01
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1011 JV AMSTERDAM
Netherlands
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