University of Chicago
April 22, 2013
Knowing when someone is being harmed on purpose is a crucial element of moral thinking, even in children. But University of Chicago neuroscientist Jean Decety’s work has shown that people's neural response to intentional harm varies by age, with adults being more discriminative in determining moral culpability.
Fellow scholar John Cacioppo has pioneered the study of loneliness, showing that it can influence a person’s health as much as cigarette smoking, obesity, or a lack of exercise. A sense of isolation affects key cellular processes within the brain, heart, and immune system, Cacioppo has found.
Their work on how people’s social lives relate to neural, hormonal, and genetic mechanisms has helped define a field called social neuroscience. Cacioppo and Decety formally established the international, interdisciplinary Society for Social Neuroscience in 2010 and have since turned UChicago into a global center for its study by launching a number of research projects to examine the brain and body’s responses to the social world.
“I realized that we will never be able to understand such human ability as moral judgment or empathy without studying the brain, its development, and evolutionary history,” says Decety, the Irving B. Harris Professor in Psychology and Psychiatry, who studies brain scans to examine the neurobiological mechanisms of empathy.
“We can’t limit our study of people strictly to their biological functions. We are influenced by our social connections,” says Cacioppo, the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor in Psychology, who coined the term “social neuroscience” more than 20 years ago. “Gene expression can be turned on or off, for example, by social conditions.”
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