The Moral Perspective: The more you think, the less you cheat
A new study in the journal Psychological Science suggests that the human tendency to cheat is a natural impulse, and that given some time for reflection, humans are less likely to cheat.
The research experiment — conducted by Shaul Shalvi, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, and his…
Which has always amazed me neuroanatomically speaking. In 2002, the first research re: fMRI and lying was published and found that the distribution of deception-related activation in the brain suggests that lying involves both conflict and suppression of the truth. So it turns out, if lying and cheating is instinctual, it certainly doesn’t mean it’s any less neurally demanding.
"Paved with Good Intentions: Sentencing Alternatives from Neuroscience and the Policy of Problem-Solving Courts"
Abstract:
Advances in basic and clinical neuroscience will soon present novel options for prediction, treatment, and prevention of antisocial behavior, particularly drug addiction. These hard-won advances have significant potential to improve public health and safety and increase efficiency in delivery of treatment and rehabilitation. Such therapies will undoubtedly find a large portion of their target population in the criminal justice system as long as drug possession remains criminalized.Improvements, however, are not without risks. The risks stem not only from the safety and side effect profile of such treatments, but also their insertion into a specialized criminal justice and sentencing system of “problem-solving courts” that may be overburdened, overpoliticized, undertheorized, and lacking sufficient checks and balances on institutional competency. While offering substantial therapeutic benefits, such developments might also short-circuit a critical policy discussion about the nature of drug use and its criminalization.
- Emily R. Murphy, Standford Law School [via]
"Emotion and Morality in Psychopathy and Paraphilias"
Many sex offenders suffer from a paraphilia. Paraphilias are disorders characterized by recurrent and intrusive deviant sexual impulses. One paraphilia that shares some characteristics with psychopathy is sexual sadism.
Sadism, like psychopathy, is characterized by callousness, anger, and low empathy. Sadists derive sexual gratification from inflicting physical or emotional pain and suffering on others, and may thus represent the extreme end of the moral sensitivity spectrum” ranging from compassion to callousness. They show increased arousal (measured by penile plethsymograph responses) when perceiving people in pain, in sexual or nonsexual situations.
While this clearly represents profound moral insensitivity, the capacity for “normal” moral judgment has not been directly investigated in this disorder. Sadists may be less likely than other sex offenders to show cognitive distortions that justify moral transgressions, since an understanding of the immorality of their actions (causing harm) is precisely what facilitates sexual gratification. Thus, like psychopaths they appear to understand the wrongness of their actions. [via]
Unlike psychopaths who know right from wrong but just don’t care, I suggest that sadists, who also enjoy inflicting pain/suffering, would show increased activation in the domain specific frontoinsular (FI) cortex, hinting at a higher sense of a certain type of empathy (comparatively) and regulation of moral judgement, depending on amount of emotional processing exercised. Pleasure and reward centers should show similair activation. wah-psh.
Harenski, C., & Kiehl, K. (2011). Emotion and Morality in Psychopathy and Paraphilias Emotion Review, 3 (3), 299-301 DOI: 10.1177/1754073911402378
Greene JD, Sommerville RB, Nystrom LE, Darley JM, & Cohen JD (2001). An fMRI investigation of emotional engagement in moral judgment. Science (New York, N.Y.), 293 (5537), 2105-8 PMID: 11557895
Greene’s “dual-process theory” of moral decision-making posits that rationality and emotion are recruited according to the circumstances, with each offering its own advantages and disadvantages. He likens the moral brain to a camera that comes with manufactured presets, such as “portrait” or “landscape,” along with a manual mode that requires photographers to make adjustments on their own. Emotional responses, which are influenced by humans’ biological makeup and social experiences, are like the presets: fast and efficient, but also mindless and inflexible. Rationality is like manual mode: adaptable to all kinds of unique scenarios, but time-consuming and cumbersome.
“The nice thing about the overall design of the camera is that it gives you the best of both worlds: efficiency in point-and-shoot mechanisms and flexibility in manual mode,” Greene explains. “The trick is to know when to point and shoot and when to use manual mode. I think that this basic design is really the design of the human brain.”
The Biology of Right and Wrong (via theatlantic)
— I was hoping the Atlantic actually did a piece on Joshua Greene. The Green/Cohen paper, For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything from 2004 is one of the most well known neurolaw papers out there. It definitely got me started in this area.
“Are Doing Harm and Allowing Harm Equivalent? Ask fMRI”
Most people, as well as the law, recognize that doing harm is morally worse than not doing anything when you know there to be a risk, thereby allowing harm to just happen. To that end, you would assume that judging the former to be worse is cognitively more demanding than the latter. Well, so did Fiery Cushman. He does research surrounding neuroethics up at Brown to see “…how the brain has evolved to process moral dilemmas and make moral judgments.”
People typically say they are invoking an ethical principle when they judge acts that cause harm more harshly than willful inaction that allows that same harm to occur. That difference is even codified in criminal law. A new study based on brain scans, however, shows that people make that moral distinction automatically. Researchers found that it requires conscious reasoning to decide that active and passive behaviors that are equally harmful are equally wrong. Via
This is interesting because you would think that in order to decide that doing harm is worse than non-acting that results in harm, it would require lots of conscious reasoning to arrive at that point, like most moral dilemmas. But it turns out, that’s the easy part for our brains requiring less activity…the hard part for our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which via the fMRI scans show evidence of using more “careful deliberative controlled thinking” is after weighing the two, deciding that they are both as bad. Now that makes even more sense, huh.
I’ve read enough of his fascinating work to contact Dr. Cushman about an idea I had a couple months ago to see if collaborations with him are possible. He is very accessible, but it appears my new lab- AKA the hardest lab to get into ever, is taking me away from this. Yes, I’m still waiting on that confirmation… fingers crossed so hard it hurts.
Above: Looking at a moral choice Test subjects who feel that doing active harm is morally the same as allowing harm to occur will show more brain activity. The notion that active harm is worse appears to be automatic, a psychological default requiring less thought. (Credit: Cushman Lab/Brown University)
So today, an Italian court reduced the sentence of a murderer when the defence team used “neuroimaging and genetic tests proved the partial mental illness of the defendant” effectively mitigating a life sentence into just 20 years.
This makes some neuro-people go bananas since there are only a hand full of people that believe brain scan technology is appropriate for the courts at this time (especially if it will help mentally ill people get treatment)…notwithstanding, we use sketchy evidence that hasn’t been through the rigors and scrutiny of academic/scientific research all. the. time.
“The decision was made not only on the basis of psychiatric assessments, but also morphological analysis and neuroscience on the brain and its genetic heritage.” via
Questions:
1. Is this a correct translation of the quote? *paging SciPsy* Cause if it is, it’s really not entirely justifiable to focus our attention solely on the brain scan, is it? What type of psychiatric assessments were used? What did they find? What type of expert did the prosecution counter with? And the MAOA gene tests, amirite?
2. Is it customary in Italy for an offender to receive psychiatric treatment in a case where psychiatric/neurological evidence was successful in showing diminished capacity? Or do they receive just incarceration?
3. Bueller?
I get that the last thing we need is another type of unreliable evidence allowed in court, but guess what neuroscientists?
Taking your kickball, going home and leaving the lawyers to play with themselves won’t make it go away. To be clear, what I mean is: discussing the flaws of applying fMRI scans to criminal behavior or aggression among scientists is super…but your not accomplishing the moratorium you so desperately want. They aren’t readying your articles, huh. So why aren’t more scientists who are concerned with this area reaching out to educate lawyers on why certain brain scans are not appropriate? You know what’s easier than waiting for research to happen and to be published and then to be accepted in to social consciousness decades later? (I’m looking at you eyewitness identification) Writing a note and publishing it in a law journal.
Here is a forum where you have the attention of lawyers, legal scholars and law students. Here is a place where you can continue the dialogue with those who intend to use these tools, instead of huffing at the absurdity of it on twitter. Here is a place where lawyers/judges can get an intro on how to digest/interpret this type of evidence when it is introduced…or at the least, find a godforsaken expert to explain it.
Yes- this has been done to an extent, and this is probably a moot point suggestion, but if setting a dangerous precedent is the main concern (and not just protecting your own academic integrity), then clearly it’s not been done enough.
In “Tinkering With Our Ethical Chemistry”, Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, writes:
Humans are born with the capacity to be moral, but it is a limited capacity which is ill equipped to deal with the ethical complexities of the modern world. For thousands of years, humans have relied on education, persuasion, social institutions, and the threat of real (or supernatural) punishment to make people behave decently. We could all be morally better, but it is clear that this traditional approach cannot take us much further. It is not as if people would suddenly begin to behave better if we just gave them more facts and statistics, or better arguments.
So we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the suggestion that science might help—in the first instance, by helping us design more effective institutions, more inspiring moral education, or more persuasive ethical arguments. But science might also offer more direct ways of influencing our brains.
These are, of course, hypothetical questions. We don’t yet know what is possible. But it is better to begin the ethical discussion too early than too late. And even if “moral pills” are just science fiction, they raise deep questions. Will we want to take them if they ever become available? And what does it say about us if we won’t?
Via. Image: D. Sharon Pruitt (CC).
When are you dead?
Little more than 40 years ago, a partially functioning brain would not have gotten in the way of organ donation; irreversible cardiopulmonary failure was still the only standard for determining death. But during the 1970s, that began to change, and by the early 1980s, the cessation of all brain activity — brain death — had become a widely accepted standard. In the transplant community, brain death was attractive for one particular reason: The bodies of such donors could remain on respirators to keep their organs healthy, even during much of the organ-removal surgery. Today, the medical establishment, facing a huge shortage of organs, needs new sources for transplantation. One solution has been a return to procuring organs from patients who die of heart failure. Before dying, these patients are likely to have been in a coma, sustained by a ventilator, with very minimal brain function — a hopeless distance from what we mean by consciousness. Still, many people, including some physicians, consider this type of organ donation, known as “donation after cardiac death” or DCD, as akin to murder.
This becomes especially interesting when neurological tests have identified very specific brain activity in comatose patients when asking questions that shows they can hear and respond by using their thoughts.
….they tested a young woman diagnosed as being in a vegetative state following a car accident. Although she was unresponsive and apparently unaware of her surroundings, she exhibited distinct patterns of brain activity when asked to imagine herself playing tennis or walking through the rooms of her house. As in healthy volunteers, imagining tennis activated motor planning regions in the woman’s brain, whereas picturing her house activated a brain region involved in recognizing familiar scenes. VIA
So, she is picturing going through the rooms of her house when you ask her to, and thinking about playing tennis just the same. And she wasn’t the only one. More patients were found to be able to communicate via yes or no with activating the motor or mapping/memory parts of their brains which are in two different locations.
These results show that a small proportion of patients in a vegetative or minimally conscious state have brain activation reflecting some awareness and cognition. Via
We still pull plugs on coma patients and can’t even decide when a fetus is a human. What is brain dead, and if we ever pull the plug, is that murder?
Martin M. Monti, Ph.D., Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse, M.Sc., Martin R. Coleman, Ph.D., Melanie Boly, M.D., John D. Pickard, F.R.C.S., F.Med.Sci., Luaba Tshibanda, M.D., Adrian M. Owen, Ph.D., and Steven Laureys, M.D., Ph.D. (2010). Willful Modulation of Brain Activity in Disorders of Consciousness N Engl J Med
Brain scans: too soon for the courts, but not interrogations.
Don’t get me wrong, this is my jam…and either way, we are working with memory here (short v long), I’m just not sure how we can differentiate (& establish reliability) between the types of memories within both categories. I have not seen that explained yet. How can we tell the difference between a memory of an actual plan with intent, or a related memory of something similar? (a movie/story/hearsay with a similar plot?) If someone with expertise on memory would chime in, that would be nice.
For the first time, the Northwestern researchers used the P300 testing in a mock terrorism scenario in which the subjects are planning, rather than perpetrating, a crime. The P300 brain waves were measured by electrodes attached to the scalp of the make-believe “persons of interest” in the lab.
The most intriguing part of the study in terms of real-word implications, Rosenfeld said, is that even when the researchers had no advance details about mock terrorism plans, the technology was still accurate in identifying critical concealed information.
“Without any prior knowledge of the planned crime in our mock terrorism scenarios, we were able to identify 10 out of 12 terrorists and, among them, 20 out of 30 crime- related details,” Rosenfeld said. “The test was 83 percent accurate in predicting concealed knowledge, suggesting that our complex protocol could identify future terrorist activity.”
Rosenfeld is a leading scholar in the study of P300 testing to reveal concealed information. Basically, electrodes are attached to the scalp to record P300 brain activity — or brief electrical patterns in the cortex — that occur, according to the research, when meaningful information is presented to a person with “guilty knowledge.” via
Involving Psychiatrists in Military Interrogations
Although this is mainly about ethics involved in being a part (even as an observer) of something cruel to a “patient”, it’s interesting they mention PSTD can appear after 30 days - and that stat is rarely seen when talking about prisoners in solitary confinement (I refuse to soften it by saying ‘administrative segregation’). Also, if it would be acceptable in this are, why not in police interrogation where psychological coercion is pretty much the goal. At the least the interrogators should go through training by some organization other than Reid or the military.
Information given when under duress is often unreliable; social psychologists have been studying a related topic –- eyewitness testimony –- for a number of years. They have found that individuals under a lot of stress, such as having a gun pointed at them, are much more unreliable than outside observers. So, there is considerable theoretical evidence that treating prisoners as humanely as possible both inside and outside interrogations leads to the most reliable information.
Physicians’ Relationships with Industry: The Principal-Agent Problem
Physicians’ relationships with the pharmaceutical and device industries have been a growing focus of attention, with questions raised about their impact on prescribing practices,diagnostic criteria, practice guidelines, continuing education, conduct and reporting of research, and patients’ and public trust.
Such relationships can be understood as giving rise to a “principal-agent problem,” which occurs when an agent—here a physician—is engaged to advance the interests of the principal—typically a patient—but faces incentives to promote other interests instead. The effects of these incentives will be discussed on 10/14 @ 4-5:15p.m. at the New York State Psychiatric Institute
I think what happens is that prosecutors and police think they’ve got the right guy, and consequently they think it’s OK to cut corners or control the game a little bit to make sure he’s convicted. The thinking goes, “God forbid a guilty guy go free because of smart lawyering by the defense” or what have you. They’re so convinced that they are right that they feel exempt from behaving right. They don’t realize that it’s wrong to be unethical. And not just because it could convict an innocent person. It’s simply wrong to be unethical.
“This is the newspaper ad that recruited subjects for Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments.”
(Via)
I was just talking about this. Very often in experimental psych studies, the participants are told the study is for something else, rather than what it is actually being studied. This little white lie is not considered trickery (like some people like to believe) but considered necessary as to not tip off the participants to what reaction/behavior the researchers are looking for (since many people try to give the “right” answer instead of their true response. The ethics problem Milgram faced with the APA for many years was not for his misleading recruitment hook, but for the treatment of the subjects & methodology. I’m pretty sure this was before IRBs were formed.
Newsweek: Antidepressants Depressingly Wonky
I don’t even know if I have the energy to launch into this, let alone all the variables/issues this article didn’t touch. Not saying I disagree, just that this is a small piece of a larger issue…ok we’ll hash it out over drinks.
