Ethics

WSJ on Brain-Punishment Study

By Adam Kolber

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article about the study by Owen Jones and others at Vandebilt on how we make punishment determinations:

"We take decision-making for granted, like breathing," says Vanderbilt law professor Owen Jones, who conducted the experiment with Vanderbilt neuroscientists Rene Marois and Joshua Buckholtz. "If you want a world in which judicial and jury decisions are fair, unbiased, sensible and reasonable, then we ought to understand a little bit about how it actually happens."

As a first step, they measured how our brain cells behave as we decide whether to punish someone accused of a crime when we have no personal stake in enforcement. The researchers tested 16 volunteers in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine. The fMRI monitored the blood flow and oxygen demand associated with neural activity as each subject made two distinct legal judgments about blame and punishment in 50 hypothetical scenarios ranging from simple theft of a music CD to rape and murder.

No one part of the brain stands in judgment of others, they found. Instead, at least two areas of the brain assess guilt and assign an appropriate penalty. An area associated with analytical reasoning, called the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, became very active, they reported. But the decision process also electrified emotional circuits. 

Full post as published by Neuroethics and Law on January 24, 2009 (boomark / email).