Summary: New brain imaging research shows that our sense of agency—the subjective feeling of being responsible for our actions—declines when we act under orders. This reduction occurs regardless of whether people are civilians or military officer cadets. In the study, participants made moral choices that involved delivering a mild shock either freely or under coercion, and fMRI results revealed diminished neural signatures of agency during coerced actions.
The study found no meaningful differences between civilian participants and officer cadets in the neural patterns associated with moral responsibility, suggesting common brain mechanisms for processing authorship and responsibility across different social environments. These results illuminate how obedience affects moral decision-making and have implications for ethics, accountability, and training in hierarchical organizations.
Key findings:
- Sense of agency decreases under orders: Participants reported feeling less responsible when they followed commands compared with when they decided freely.
- Similar effects in civilians and military cadets: Brain activity linked to moral responsibility showed no significant divergence between the two groups.
- Relevance for training and policy: Results underline the importance of cultivating personal responsibility within hierarchical systems to limit harms caused by blind obedience.
Source: BIAL Foundation
Overview: This study examined how the brain represents the sense of agency during moral decision-making and whether those representations differ between civilians and military officer cadets. The research addresses a central question in social neuroscience: does acting under orders alter the subjective and neural experience of responsibility, and does professional environment shape that effect?
Everyday life mixes freely chosen acts with decisions constrained by rules, social pressures, or directives from others. A large body of historical and experimental research shows that restricted freedom of choice can lead people to perform harmful acts they might otherwise avoid. Understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie moral choices and perceived responsibility is therefore essential for ethics, justice, and organizational practice.
A central concept in this field is the sense of agency (SoA): the subjective feeling of being the author of one’s actions and their consequences. SoA supports accountability and moral responsibility. Prior experiments have shown that SoA weakens when people obey orders rather than decide freely, but the neural basis of this change during morally relevant choices—and whether it generalizes across social groups—remained understudied.
To investigate these questions, Axel Cleeremans and colleagues at the Centre for Research in Cognition and Neuroscience, Université libre de Bruxelles, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to record brain activity while participants made moral decisions. The sample included 19 military officer cadets and 24 civilian control participants. During the task, participants either freely chose or were instructed to deliver a mild electric shock to a designated recipient, allowing the team to directly compare voluntary and coerced moral actions.
Researchers assessed SoA using the temporal binding measure: when people feel more agentic, they perceive the interval between their action and its outcome as shorter. Temporal binding therefore provides a behavioral index of how voluntary or compelled an action feels.
fMRI analyses identified several brain regions whose activity correlated with temporal binding and SoA measures. These regions included parts of the occipital lobe, the superior, middle and inferior frontal gyri, the precuneus, and the lateral occipital cortex—areas previously implicated in sensory processing, agency, and self-referential cognition. Across the whole sample, temporal binding and neural markers of agency were reduced when participants acted under orders compared with when they acted freely.
Crucially, no statistically significant differences emerged between military cadets and civilian participants at corrected thresholds, indicating that the neural underpinnings of agency during moral decision-making were consistent across these groups. According to the authors, this similarity suggests that everyday professional environment, at least in the case of officer cadets trained to assume responsibility, exerts limited influence on the basic neural mechanisms of moral authorship.
The authors note an important caveat: these military participants were officer cadets trained in responsibility. Earlier research indicates that lower rank or more constrained roles can further diminish the sense of agency. Therefore, effects might differ among personnel with less autonomy. This distinction points to potential directions for responsibility-focused training within hierarchical organizations, as enhancing personal authorship may reduce harm when people face coercive orders.
About this morality and neuroscience research news
Author: Sandra Pinto
Source: BIAL Foundation
Contact: Sandra Pinto – BIAL Foundation
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: Open access. “Neural correlates of the sense of agency in free and coerced moral decision-making among civilians and military personnel” by Axel Cleeremans et al., published in Cerebral Cortex.
Abstract
Neural correlates of the sense of agency in free and coerced moral decision-making among civilians and military personnel
The sense of agency—the feeling of authorship over one’s actions and their outcomes—is essential for moral decision-making. Most prior neuroscience work examined neutral tasks and convenience samples, leaving open how agency operates during moral choices and whether social environments shape its neural basis. This study used an fMRI paradigm in which civilians and military officer cadets made free or coerced choices, acting either as agent or commander, and could deliver a mild shock to a victim. Sense of agency was measured via temporal binding, capturing temporal distortions tied to voluntariness. Results indicated reduced SoA when participants followed orders versus acted freely, with several brain regions (occipital lobe, frontal gyri, precuneus, lateral occipital cortex) correlating with temporal binding. No group differences were observed at corrected statistical thresholds, suggesting the neural mechanisms of agency in moral decision-making are similar across these populations and may generalize beyond specific daily environments.