The Anatomy of Moral Behavior Neural, Physiological, and Behavioral Dynamics in Interactions with Artificial Entities
As artificial agents become companions and collaborators, this project asks whether the moral instincts we evolved for human relationships extend to machines.
Where do our moral obligations begin and end? Across history, cultures have extended moral consideration beyond humans, to animals, landscapes, and invisible agents, embedding these norms in rituals and taboos. Today, artificial agents pose a new version of this old question: neither alive nor passive, yet designed to interact with us and respond to our behavior. Is it then acceptable to lie to a virtual assistant, or be rude to a chatbot?
Moral decisions are rarely purely rational. We often rely on rapid, gut-level judgments shaped by the body itself: its neural processes, physiological states, and expressions. Yet research on moral behavior remains fragmented, studying brain, body, and behavior separately rather than as one system.
This matters more as artificial agents increasingly populate our lives as companions and collaborators. Does the moral architecture that evolved for human relationships extend to machines? This project asks whether moral decisions unfold through consistent brain-body-behavior dynamics, and whether these dynamics hold, weaken, or reorganize when directed toward artificial entities–in dialogue with philosophical and anthropological perspectives on acting (im)morally in an artificial world.