a hallmark characteristic of psychopathy. As a consequence, Decety investigates atypical socioemotional processing and moral judgment in forensic psychopaths with a mobile MRI scanner, because they provide a natural model in which emotional and attentional processes are altered, enabling identification of downstream effects, including the extent to which empathy is a critical input for caring. His work shows that the higher the level of psychopathy, the less neural activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex in response to perceiving interpersonal harm as well as expressions of physical and emotional pain. This region is attributed with various functions related to valuation, affect regulation and social cognition. Moral conviction 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. While violence is often described as antithetical to sociality, it can be motivated by moral values with the ultimate goal of regulating social relationships, as shown by the work of Alan Fiske. In fact, most violence in the world appears to be rooted in conflict between moral values. Moral development across cultures To understand how morality emerges from the interaction between innate predispositions, shaped by evolution and input from local cultural environments, Decety conducts empirical research on the development of moral cognition and its relation to prosociality across different countries using behavioral economics games. A first study combined measures of socioeconomic status (SES), executive functions, affective sharing, empathy, theory of mind, and moral judgment in predicting altruism in children from the age of 5 to 12 in five large‐scale societies: Canada, China, Turkey, South Africa, and the US. Results demonstrate that age, gender, SES, and cognitive processes (executive function and theory of mind), but not empathy, were the best predictor of children's generosity in a costly resource allocation game. Such results fit well with a growing literature suggesting that advanced theory of mind and executive functioning promote moral behavior. A second study examined the extent to which social norms are integrated into fairness considerations and how they influence social preferences regarding equality and equity in a large sample of children in Argentina, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cuba, Jordan, Mexico, Norway, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, and the US. Social decision-making in distributive justice games revealed universal developmental shifts from equality-based to equity-based distribution decisions across cultures. However, differences in levels of individualism and collectivism between