CHAPTER 19 Toward an Integrated Science of Morality Linking Mind, Society and Culture R ENGIN F IRAT AND C HAD MICHAEL MC P HERSON Morality has long been of interest to social scientists, yet over the last decade new tools have invigorated its scientific investigation. The most widely employed newly emergent tool is brain imaging technology employed within neuropsychological studies investigating the moral cognition and emotions. This chapter outlines broad themes from this research as a first step towards building an empirically-based and theoretically-informed bridge between moral psychology and sociologically derived understanding of culturally constructed moral schemas. With a few notable exceptions (e.g., DiMaggio, Haidt, Vaisey), researchers inter- ested in morality focus on one or the other pole of the society–individual link. This can lead to theoretical blind spots, such as research focused on universally “hard-wired morality” that obscures differences in moral functioning shaped by social structure and culture. The way the human brain works is fundamentally social, “it is our nature to nurture and to be nurtured” (Wexler 2006:13). Among the animal species, human brain has the longest period of growth and development shaped by the environment. But the human brain is not only shaped by the environment, it also shapes the shared social world (Wexler 2006). At the same time, a sociol- ogy of morality becomes too insular if it fails to link so-called macro influences with current research on psychological functioning. Fundamental challenges complicate any synthesis between sociological and neuropsy- chological research, primary among them are a lack of common language and common assumptions. Rather than seek to criticize scholars for failing to attend to the vast array of problems and challenges posed by others with whom they likely have minimal, if any contact, we instead hope to bring together literatures that typically talk past one another. Disciplinary boundaries render one field’s central concerns – for example, sociological concerns with social structure, culture, interpersonal interaction and social context) – as “background noise” within another (like neurological psychology). We focus on introducing and potentially bridging con- cepts and findings, not methodologies. We do this in the service of motivating interdisciplinary research that properly includes sociological insights: how do we construct research that affords the investigation of human minds in relation to their social environment? We suggest that the term ‘person’ offers a pivot for potential linkages, as it points to cen- tral concerns regarding members of a social community and not simply humans as biological 361 S. Hitlin, S. Vaisey (eds.), Handbook of the Sociology of Morality, Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6896-8_19, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010