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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Contents Vol 24(3)

Intact moral decision-making in adults with moderate-severe traumatic brain injury

Malcolm Edwards https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2604-3346 A * , Emily L. Morrow B and Melissa C. Duff A B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Meharry Medical College, Nashville, TN, USA

B Department of Hearing & Speech Sciences, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN, USA

* Correspondence to: medwards18@email.mmc.edu

Brain Impairment 24(3) 568-585 https://doi.org/10.1017/BrImp.2022.11
Submitted: 23 April 2021  Accepted: 23 March 2022  Published: 3 May 2022

© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Australasian Society for the Study of Brain Impairment

Abstract

Background and aim:

Deficits in decision-making are a common consequence of moderate-severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). Less is known, however, about how individuals with TBI perform on moral decision-making tasks. To address this gap in the literature, the current study probed moral decision-making in a sample of individuals with TBI using a widely employed experimental measure.

Methods/hypothesis:

We administered a set of 50 trolley-type dilemmas to 31 individuals with TBI and 31 demographically matched, neurotypical comparison participants. We hypothesized that individuals with TBI would be more likely to offer utilitarian responses to personal dilemmas than neurotypical peers.

Results:

In contrast to our hypothesis, we observed that individuals with TBI were not more likely to offer utilitarian responses for personal dilemmas.

Conclusion:

Our results suggest that moral decision-making ability is not uniformly impaired following TBI. Rather, neuroanatomical (lesion location) and demographic (age at injury) characteristics may be more predictive of a disruption in moral decision-making than TBI diagnosis or injury severity alone. These results inform the neurobiology of moral decision-making and have implications for characterizing patterns of spared and impaired cognitive abilities in TBI.

Keywords: Moral judgment, moral decision-making, traumatic brain injury, cognition.

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