1. Jean Decety's research focuses on the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms underpinning social cognition, particularly social decision-making, empathy, moral reasoning, altruism, pro-social behavior, and more generally interpersonal relationships.
Jean Decety is Irving B Harris Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
Jean Decety obtained three advanced master's degrees in 1985, in 1986, and in 1987 and was awarded a Ph.
Jean Decety then joined the National Institute for Medical Research in Lyon until 2001.
Jean Decety is the Director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, and the Child NeuroSuite.
Jean Decety is a member of the Committee on Computational Neuroscience and the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroengineering.
In 2022, Jean Decety was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea, a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences, in the Physiology and Neuroscience section.
Jean Decety served as the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Social Neuroscience between 2006 and 2012, and he is on the editorial boards of Development and Psychopathology, The European Journal of Neuroscience, The Scientific World Journal, Frontiers in Emotion Science, and Neuropsychologia.
Olympians use imagery as mental training Research pioneered by Jean Decety using psychophysics, functional neuroimaging, H-reflex excitability, as well as measures of the autonomic nervous system, demonstrated that imagining an action activates similar neural representations that would be engaged by carrying out the same action.
Jean Decety conducts research on various aspects of empathy, including its evolutionary origins, its development in young children, as well as how empathy is modulated by the social environment and interpersonal relationships.
Jean Decety investigates the development of moral behavior, generosity and distributive justice in children across South East Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America, and South Africa.
Jean Decety argues that empathy is not necessarily a direct avenue to moral behavior, and that it can lead to immoral behavior.
Jean Decety thinks that the ability to recognize and vicariously experience what another individual is undergoing was a key step forward in the evolution of social behavior, and ultimately, morality.
Jean Decety proposes that empathic concern has evolved to favor kin and members of one own social group, can bias social decision-making by valuing one single individual over a group of others, and this can frontally conflict with principles of fairness and justice.
Recently, drawing on empirical research in evolutionary theory, developmental psychology, social neuroscience, and psychopathy, Jean Decety argued that empathy and morality are neither systematically opposed to one another, nor inevitably complementary.
Jean Decety started a new line of inquiry into characterizing the neural mechanisms of what he calls "the dark side of morality," in particular, the role of moral conviction in justifying violence.
However, Jean Decety has retracted the study, citing an analysis error which nullified the studies conclusion on religiousness and altruism.