Neuroscience of justice

In a new study, researchers scanned the brains of people as they were deciding whether someone should be punished for a crime, and what that punishment should be. It turns out that regions of the brain associated with rational thoughts and also emotion light up during the process. A team of law and neuroscience researchers from Vanderbilt University conducted the study. They hope to shed light on how complex legal decisions are made. Eventually, the line of research might also help determine whether judges and other arbitrators come up with judgements using the same mental processes as the rest of us. From Science News:

“Our judicial system based on third-party punishment is usually seen as cold and detached as opposed to … punishment by the victim of a crime,” Marois says. The new study shows that emotions play a part in impartial judgment too.br>
Scientists have used functional MRI, or fMRI, before to scan the brains of people who are trying to decide whether to retaliate against someone who has cheated them in an economic game. But the new study is the first to examine which parts of the brain are active when an impartial third party makes decisions about guilt and punishment...

The amount of activity in (brain) areas involved in determining responsibility and whether to punish did not correlate to severity of punishment. Instead, harsher penalties were associated with increased activity in the amygdala and other parts of the brain involved in processing emotion. The degree of punishment matched the level of activity in the amygdala...

That doesn’t mean people make punishment decisions based on emotion, Jones says. “The causal arrow could run in the other direction – having decided to punish someone severely could cause an emotional response.”

"In the brain, justice is served from many parts"

• [Takuan]

  judges will do as they please so long as it serves them. It’s not complicated.

• [samu]

  The article pretends that an “emotional component” is surprising. If there wasn’t one, how would we account for the success of the courtroom drama?!

• [thequickbrownfox]

  This fMRI stuff is the worst junk science and I’m surprised BB would succumb to it.

  It’s nothing more than phrenology, though now done with mega-expensive and impressive looking gadgetry.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology

• [Takuan]

  is the idea that brain scans will one day be used as lie detectors for plaintiffs and defendants and as impartiality enforcers on judges? I want to be a service tech then.

• [Antinous]

  It’s nothing more than phrenology, though now done with mega-expensive and impressive looking gadgetry.

  Did you have some basis for making that extraordinary statement? Or do you also think that microwaves are just an artifact of mass hysteria?

• [klaradox]

  I didn’t look up any references for the following information, but as I’ve read somewhere, our emotions are always part of our logical thinking. It is like the subconscious computer in our brain, the way we process complex information. Logic is part of our conscious thought. So this is not a problem or something to frown upon. It is just simply how our brain works.

• [justanotherusername]

  What the results show is that, “Our sense of propriety when it comes to punishment is not the result of a single neural system,” Greene says.

  Wow.

• [Takuan]

  so what was that judge they caught using the penis pump thinking of?

• [happykittybunny]

  The idea that there is a difference between “rational thought” and “emotion”, and that there are different parts of the brain for it is so stupid that it’s laughable.

  This is an example of what Minsky calls a “dumbell theory”, where there is an insurmountable temptation to divide everything into two opposing parts in order to understand it.

  Emotion and rational thought are the same thing. They are all part of thinking. There are probably hundreds of different agencies in the brain which are enabled in hierarchies of control and supression or stimulation. Dividing it into “emotional” and “rational” is really less than useless.

• [thequickbrownfox]

  I mean these things can be useful for pointing out blood-clots and tumors and such, but these “studies” that appear everywhere in the tabloid media are just images of ephemeral synaptic activity.

  http://www.badscience.net/2007/11/this-is-your-brain-this-is-your-brain-on-politics-any-questions/

• [zuzu]

  Interesting implications for legal realism.