In judging the moral status of an action, adult observers consider not only the outcome of the action but the actor's mental state at the time of action. For example, accidental harms are exculpated, and failed murder attempts are punished. The studies presented here take a cognitive neuroscience approach to theory of mind, the capacity for mental state reasoning, in moral judgment.

Study 1 suggests that moral judgment in the mature state depends on both a process for encoding mental states (e.g., beliefs) and a process for integrating mental states with other morally relevant information (e.g., outcomes); neural evidence is provided for these separate component processes. Study 2 provides neural evidence for a third cognitive process for theory of mind in moral judgment—spontaneous theory of mind in the absence of any reference to the agent's mental state. Studies 1 and 2 revealed the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ) to be the most selective in the encoding, integration, and spontaneous inference of mental states for moral judgment. The activation patterns associated with these processes were observed to have distinct functional profiles, to occur at distinct time points in the stimulus, and for distinct components of the stimulus. The roles of the left TPJ, precuneus, and medial prefrontal cortex are also discussed. Study 3 shows that selectively disrupting activity in the RTPJ results in a pattern of moral judgments that relies less on beliefs and more on outcomes, supporting (1) a causal role for the RTPJ in processing beliefs and (2) the contribution of functionally dissociable mechanisms for processing distinct features of actions. Together, these studies suggest not only that moral judgment may best be described as the product of multiple mechanisms, i.e. operating over outcomes and mental states, but also that theory of mind for moral judgment is not a single unitary process.