Jean Decety is an American and French neuroscientist specializing in developmental neuroscience, affective neuroscience, and social neuroscience.
Education
Jean Decety obtained three advanced master"s degrees in 1985 (neuroscience), in 1986 (cognitive psychology), and in 1987 (biological and medical engineering science) and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy in 1989 (neurobiology) from the Université Claude Bernard.
Career
His research focuses on the cognitive and neurobiological mechanisms underpinning social cognition, particularly emotion, empathy, moral reasoning, altruism, pro-social behavior, and more generally interpersonal processes. He is Irving B. Harris Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. After receiving his doctorate, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Karolinska Hospital (Sweden) in the Departments of Neurophysiology and Neuroradiology.
He then joined the National Institute for Medical Research (Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale) in Lyon (France) until 2001.
Decety is currently professor at the University of Chicago and the College, with appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience. Decety conducts research and teaches on various aspects of empathy, including its evolutionary origins, its development in young children, as well as how the experience of empathy is modulated by social context and interpersonal relationships.
Decety also investigates atypical socioemotional processing and moral judgment in criminal psychopaths. Decety also studies the development of moral reasoning and how emotion and cognition contribute to moral behavior and motivation for justice.
He argues that empathy is not necessarily a direct avenue to moral behavior, and that it can lead to immoral behavior.
The influence that empathy and justice exert on one another is complex, and empathy can induce partiality and threaten justice principles. Based on empirical research combining functional neuroimaging and individual differences in personality traits, Decety argues that in order to promote justice motivation, it may be more effective to encourage perspective taking and reasoning to induce concern for others than emphasizing emotional sharing with the misfortune of others J. J. J. J. J. J.
Membership
Decety is a member of the Committee on Computational Neuroscience and the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroengineering.