Empathic Behavior Analysis

Empathy is a strong contributor to the remarkable human aversion to inflicting harm. Although extant work has investigated how present empathic responses prevent harmful actions, little work has focused on how our past empathic experiences help us learn to assign negative values to harmful actions.

Our approach is to understand this process of learning moral values by drawing on formal computational models. We use the two distinct systems known to guide choice behavior: the habitual internalized “model-free” system, and the goal-directed planning “model-based” system.

We modeled our empathic learning experiment on a previous two-step reinforcement learning task that identifies which of the two decision-making systems has greater control in making non-social choices. This task can dissociate model-based and model-free strategies based on different predictions these strategies make on how second-stage rewards affect subsequent first-stage choices. We investigate the computational architecture for moral decision-making by introducing empathy-inducing stimuli— morphed images of faces expressing varying degrees of pain. …show more content…
Does empathy have a greater impact on decision-making by using agoal-directed planning system or by triggering an automatic and internalized dislike for actions that cause