Beyond legality: Students’ moral attitudes toward non-invasive brain stimulation for cognitive enhancement

Cognitive enhancement involves using substances or technologies to improve mental performance in healthy individuals. While methods such as caffeine are widely accepted, others, including prescription stimulants and non-invasive brain stimulation (tDCS), evoke ethical concern. This study examined how university students evaluate three forms of cognitive enhancement (natural, pharmacological, brain stimulation) across five moral domains: academic fairness, free will, authenticity/naturalness, self-identity, and safety. We also tested how evaluations were shaped by framing (preservation vs. enhancement) and priming (self-affecting vs. non self-affecting). A total of 449 undergraduate psychology students (81.7% female) from a single UK university were recruited via convenience sampling and completed an online experiment with a 2 × 2 × 3 mixed design, rating enhancement acceptability after reading intervention-specific scenarios. Natural enhancers were judged most positively, followed by brain stimulation and then pharmacological agents. Safety concerns also differed across enhancement types, with pharmacological enhancement viewed as posing the greatest risk, followed by brain stimulation, while natural enhancement was perceived as the safest option. Importantly, although brain stimulation is legal and marketed as non-invasive, it was evaluated more like pharmacological enhancement than natural methods, indicating that legality alone does not determine moral acceptance. Framing effects showed that participants were more accepting of enhancement when it was described as preserving ability rather than augmenting it beyond baseline. Priming participants to consider how others’ use might affect their own outcomes reduced moral acceptability, particularly for pharmacological and brain stimulation methods in the domain of academic fairness. Overall, students’ attitudes were shaped by both perceived safety and broader moral concerns relating to fairness, authenticity, and competition. These findings highlight the importance of adopting pluralistic, context-sensitive approaches to policy and regulation that extend beyond considerations of legality alone.