A recent study from Korea University, published in May 2025 in JNeurosci, explores the connection between interoception, or internal bodily awareness, and moral decision-making [2]. Researchers JuYoung Kim and Hackjin Kim provide experimental evidence suggesting that interoception influences the alignment of individual moral choices with group consensus [2].
The study involved measuring participants' interoceptive awareness through self-reports and heartbeat detection tasks [2]. Participants were then asked to compare their moral choices with those of an anonymized peer group in hypothetical scenarios [2]. The results indicated a link between internal bodily awareness and aligning decisions with group consensus, mediated by brain activity in regions associated with self-referential processing and internal attention [2].
Specifically, the insular cortex, a key area for interoceptive signals, showed increased activity when moral choices mirrored group consensus [2, 3]. The researchers propose that moral intuitions stem from integrating interoceptive inputs within self-referential neural frameworks [2]. These findings challenge traditional views that consider moral decision-making as purely cognitive [2]. This research highlights how bodily sensations contribute to our ethical lives [2, 4, 11].