Social hierarchy influences moral behavior: cognitive computational mechanisms

Social hierarchy is an important component of human society, and the behavior of those at higher social levels is more easily learned and imitated by others. This study manipulates peer social hierarchy (high and low) to examine peer influence under prosocial and antisocial moral preferences, and uses computational modeling to reveal the cognitive computation mechanism. This study adopted the electric shock-money paradigm from previous research (Crockett et al., 2014; Yu et al., 2021). In this study, participants were required to complete experimental tasks as both decision-makers and predictors.