Research Suggests People With Greater Bodily Awareness have Stronger Moral Compasses

Once primarily considered a mental dilemma, research suggests our moral compass is more often felt through our bodies.

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We know a lot about our shared, objective external world, whereas our personal, subjective internal worlds — our minds, consciousness, intuition, and moral compass — remain largely mysterious. We all experience such phenomena, but the details about how they emerge and vary between individuals remain largely mysterious.

Thankfully, technological advancements provide scientists with more opportunities to gain insight into our internal experiences, to learn things like that consciousness may involve quantum entanglement or that anendophasia and aphantasia exist. And now, a new study identified a link between a person's level of body awareness and the strength of their moral compass.

Values, Morals, and Ethics

In addition to diversity and curiosity, cooperation is one of our most enduring and successful survival skills, which likely evolved when the future of our species hinged on a single choice: cooperate or perish.

Without values, morals, or ethics to help us get along, social chaos would theoretically ensue, and societies everywhere would crumble because anyone could do anything to anyone at any time for any reason.

Still, despite their enormous importance, we know relatively little about our values, morals, and ethics. So, before we discuss the new research, let’s take a moment to review their similarities and differences, because while the three terms are often used interchangeably, there are some essential distinctions.

We’ll start with our values, which are our personal, deeply rooted beliefs about right and wrong. How we define or decide what is right and wrong forms the foundation of our personality and influences our behavior.

For instance, if you value honesty more than success, then you probably wouldn’t cheat on a test, even if it means getting a lower grade in the class. However, if you value success more than honesty, then you might not have an issue with the dishonesty of cheating on a test if it means you get a higher grade in the class.

When our values are shared by others in our community, they become morals that shape how we interact and treat each other. Once adopted by societies, morals gain more clarity and context as they become social guidelines, such as respecting others’ property and tolerating differences.

While values represent the things that are important to us and shape our personal beliefs, morals relate to the “good” or bad” behaviors between people based on what society deems is “right” or wrong.”

For example, helping a neighbor is typically considered a morally “good” or “right” thing because it shows you value community. Meanwhile, stealing is considered morally “bad” or “wrong” because it conflicts with valuing the community.

Meanwhile, ethics add another layer of specificity by dictating a set of principles or rules that people and organizations use to govern their decision-making processes regarding what they believe to be right from wrong.

For instance, medical practitioners and government officials adopt codes of ethics designed to guide their decisions and judgments in the best interest of protecting their patients and ensuring justice.

Still, while we’ve discerned more definitive definitions of each term, there is much to learn. Thankfully, a recent study by a pair of neuroscientists just revealed a long-overlooked influence on our moral compass.

Moral Compass

While morals typically refer to unofficial social guidelines within a community, moral decision-making refers to an individual’s choice about how to behave based on those guidelines.

The term “moral compass” is a metaphor for our moral decision-making process. While a regular compass detects and responds to the Earth's natural magnetic fields to determine cardinal directions, our moral compass metaphorically assesses our values and what we think our community would do to determine whether a decision is “right” or “wrong.”

In terms of survival, literally and figuratively, previous research suggests that siding with the majority may help relieve some mental strain and conserve energy. As neuroscientist Hackjin Kim, at Korea University, in Seoul, South Korea, told Skyler Ware of Live Science,

"Recent theories suggest that our brains are designed to minimize physical resource consumption while maintaining survival. One way to do this [conserve energy] is to learn others' expectations to avoid social conflict."

Similarly, moral decision-making is traditionally considered a rational thought process.

For instance, a person who is tempted to steal from their friend may use think something along the lines of “I value my friendship, so I should not steal from them because doing so may jeopardize our relationship,” and thus refrain from their urge because they’re capable of reasoning about the consequences of stealing from their friend and deeming it morally wrong.

It makes sense that rational thoughts influence our moral decision-making, and that learning to accommodate others’ expectations helps us maintain peace, thereby conserving our brain’s energy.

However, just because something makes sense doesn’t make it true, or at least it doesn’t mean it’s the full explanation.

During an interview for Standford Business’s If/Then: Business, Leadership, Society podcast, Professor of Marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Baba Shiv, who researches how brain structures related to emotion and motivation affect the choices we make, explained that our so-called “rational brain” is responsible for only about 5 to 10 percent of our decision making, whereas our “Emotions… have a profound influence on our decisions and we aren’t aware of it.”

In other words, rationality is not our default decision-making tactic, as much as we like to think otherwise. Instead, it’s our emotions and feelings that usually fuel our decisions.

And while much research focuses on finding links between our moral compass and rational mind, many people, including myself, experience intuitive feelings while making moral decisions. Yet, researchers have never really investigated these internal bodily signals or their origins. Until now, that is.

Kim and his colleague, JuYoung Kim, also a neuroscientist at Korea University, in Seoul, South Korea, became curious as to whether a person’s level of internal bodily awareness — known as interoception — might be the biological foundation for how we cultivate and maintain our sense of right and wrong within a community without having to rationalize and analyze every decision consciously.

So, the duo set out to test whether people who are more attuned to their bodily signals are more likely to make moral decisions that align with others’ expectations.

The Research