Shifting Evaluative Construal: Common and Distinct Neural Components of Moral, Pragmatic, and Hedonic Evaluations

People generate evaluations of different attitude objects based on their goals and aspects of the social context. Prior research suggests that people can shift between at least three types of evaluations to judge whether something is good or bad: pragmatic (how costly or beneficial it is), moral (whether it is aligned with moral norms), and hedonic (whether it feels good; Van Bavel et al., 2012). The current research examined the neurocognitive computations underlying these types of evaluations to understand how people construct affective judgments. Specifically, we examined whether different types of evaluations stem from a common neural evaluation system that incorporates different information in response to changing evaluation goals (moral, pragmatic, or hedonic), or distinct evaluation systems with different neurofunctional architectures. We found support for a hybrid evaluation system in which people rely on a set of brain regions to construct all three forms of evaluation but recruit additional distinct regions for each type of evaluation. The three types of evaluations all relied on common neural activity in affective structures such as the amygdala, the insula, and the hippocampus. However, moral evaluations involved greater neural activation in the orbitofrontal and cingulate cortex compared to pragmatic evaluations, and temporoparietal regions compared to hedonic evaluations. These results suggest that people use a hybrid system that includes common evaluation components as well as distinct ones to generate moral judgments.