Neuroethics & Law Blog

Media Violence, Sex, Morality, Neuroethics, Controversy, and all that Good Stuff (Blumenthal)

My time is winding down (if it hasn’t already), but before I do the final—sincere—“thanks-for-letting-me-guest” post, I wanted to flag a couple new pieces in a “science-and-law” discussion that I’ve always enjoyed.

Earlier this month two (more) studies were published linking different sorts of media with negative behavior.  Both got a good chunk of press attention.  One study, Exposure to Degrading Versus Nondegrading Music Lyrics and Sexual Behavior Among Youth, showed that "Listening to music with degrading sexual lyrics is related to advances in a range of sexual activities among adolescents, whereas this does not seem to be true of other sexual lyrics.”  The other, The Effect of Video Game Violence on Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life Violence, showed that “violent video game exposure can cause desensitization to real-life violence.”  Both drew policy implications from their findings: “the modern entertainment media landscape could accurately be described as an effective systematic violence desensitization tool.  Whether modern societies want this to continue is largely a public policy question, not an exclusively scientific one" and "Reducing the amount of degrading sexual content in popular music or reducing young people's exposure to music with this type of content could help delay the onset of sexual behavior."

The media violence debate has been around for a while, of course, but these are two very interesting new studies, and I think the debate highlights issues that will be at the front of neuroethics and law discussions in the near future, especially trying to balance empirical findings with legal and policy considerations (I won't get into the juicy, equally interesting, paternalism issues they raise!).

Based on the literature I know of, my opinion is there’s a pretty well-established link between media violence and aggressive/antisocial behavior. Haejung Paik & George Comstock, The Effects of Television Violence on Antisocial Behavior: A Meta-Analysis, 21 COMM. RES. 516 (1994); see also Brad J. Bushman & Craig Anderson, Media Violence and the American Public: Scientific Facts Versus Media Misinformation, 56 AM. PSYCHOL. 477 (2001).  So what—I ask my Law and the Social Sciences students—do we do?  Even showing that link (and let’s say it’s shown to be causal), there’s that pesky First Amendment.  So, as with many other issues, we have to balance what empirical data may clearly show with other policy, legal, and constitutional factors that may militate against applying the data in the way, or to the extent, social scientists might hope.  Again, I think this will be an important neuroethics-and-the-law issue—for instance, as discussion of Marc Hauser’s work (see post below) has and, I think, will continue to demonstrate.

I and others have suggested that one benefit of getting such data out there anyway, though, is the transparency it encourages: “there is a very real benefit to presenting social science research even when the law bases its decision on these alternative factors, ‘forcing’ a deciding court to articulate more precisely the legal and policy basis for its decision.  Indeed, for some commentators, whether or not the proposed research is accepted by the court, the benefit inheres in ‘compel[ling] judges to act like judges, stating clearly the fundamental values and normative premises on which their decisions are grounded, rather than hiding behind empirical errors or uncertainties.’”  Jeremy A. Blumenthal, Law and Social Science in the Twenty-First Century, 12 S. CAL. INTERDISCIPLINARY L.J. 1, 51 (2002) (quoting Thomas Grisso & Michael J. Saks, Psychology's Influence on Constitutional Interpretation: A Comment on How to Succeed, 15 LAW & HUM. BEHAV. 205, 208 (1991)).

So I use those media studies as examples of what I think will be quite exciting policy discussions in this burgeoning field, discussions I look forward to.

Nunsense Says Pescovitz on Brain Region for Mystical Experiences

David Pescovitz at BoingBoing comments on research finding no particularized brain region associated with mystical experiences, after fMRI scanning of 15 nuns who contemplated such experinces during scanning.

Virtual Fraud

After Jeremy's borderline topical post, I'll add one of my own.  Eugene Volokh posts at the Volokh Conspiracy about a MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) where, for example, thousands of people interact in a virtual gaming community--owning virtual real estate, virtual money, etc.  In one game, called Eve Online, a player set up a virtual bank, promising to pay interest on deposited money, but then proceeded to run off with 790 billion units of fictional currency.

All of this would be entirely uninteresting outside of the game itself, but for the fact that the fictional currency trades on eBay for the real thing.  So the "virtual fraudster" ran off with the equivalent of about $80,000-$100,000, were he able to resell it at market rates on eBay.  Nevertheless, there is probably less here than meets the eye.  It seems that the game itself arguably treats deception of this sort as, well, part of the game.  Also, as I understand it based on the interesting comments to Eugene's post, it violates the players' licensing agreement to trade virtual currency for real currency.  Still, one of these days, I suspect we will see a case where someone tries to apply real-world law to virtual behavior in a gaming environment.  Science fiction enthusiasts everywhere will smile....

Best Job in the World (Blumenthal)

(I apologize; nothing to do with neuroethics this post.)

Our first day of upper-class courses was today, and I began my Legal Psychology course.  Sure I griped the last few weeks about starting up again, but I really have to say: this is FUN!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Mikhail on Rorty on Hauser on Universal Moral Grammar

On the Georgetown Law Faculty Blog, John Mikhail (Law/Phi., Georgetown) comments on Richard Rorty's review of Marc Hauser's new book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.  Overall, John thinks that Rorty fails to do justice to the book and to the topic, much of which John pioneered in his doctoral research and related work.

Check out John's post here.  And here are some snippets from Rorty's review:

Many of the experiments Hauser tells us about are intended to delimit stages in child development. Three-year-olds already know, for example, that “if an act causes harm, but the intention was good, then the act is judged less severely.” Hauser takes this fact to support the claim that “rather than a learned capacity ... our ability to detect cheaters who violate social norms is one of nature’s gifts.” But do such facts as that children learn to use expressions like “didn’t mean to do it” at roughly the same time as they learn “shouldn’t have done it” help us draw a line between nature and nurture? Hauser does not spell out the relevance of data about child development to the question of whether internalizing a moral code requires a dedicated area of the brain.

To convince us that such an organ exists, Hauser would have to start by drawing a bright line separating what he calls “the moral domain” — one that nonhuman species cannot enter — from other domains. But he never does. The closest he comes is saying things like “a central difference between social conventions and moral rules is the seriousness of an infraction.” He takes this to suggest “that moral rules consist of two ingredients: a prescriptive theory or body of knowledge about what one ought to do, and an anchoring set of emotions.” Apparently both rules of etiquette and moral rules embody knowledge about what ought to be done. All that is distinctive about morality is added emotional freight. But, as Hauser tells us, many nonhuman species obey social conventions. (For example, “Do not start tearing at the carcass before the alpha male has eaten his fill.”) It is hard to see why evolution had to carve out a new, specialized organ just to generate the extra emotional intensity that differentiates guilt from chagrin.

Toward the end, Rorty offers this interesting and somewhat curious statement:

[N]ow imagine that we are debating the merits of a proposed change in what we tell our kids about right and wrong. The neurobiologists intervene, explaining that the novel moral code will not compute. We have, they tell us, run up against hard-wired limits: our neural layout permits us to formulate and commend the proposed change, but makes it impossible for us to adopt it. Surely our reaction to such an intervention would be, “You might be right, but let’s try adopting it and see what happens; maybe our brains are a bit more flexible than you think.” It is hard to imagine our taking the biologists’ word as final on such matters, for that would amount to giving them a veto over utopian moral initiatives.

Gorillaese

Here's the caption for this AP photo taken by Mary Altaffer:

Imani, left, a western lowland gorilla, stands with her unnamed son born Feb. 19, 2006 in the Congo Gorilla Forest exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, Tuesday, Aug. 22, 2006 in New York.

I wonder why she's waiting so long to name him . . . .

Revised Memory Dampening Article

I have a revised version of my article, "Therapeutic Forgetting: The Legal and Ethical Implications of Memory Dampening," (forthcoming in the Vanderbilt Law Review) on SSRN.  You can download it here for free (scroll down to find the download link).  I welcome your comments on it at: akolber**at**sandiego**.**edu

Neuromarketing an Anti-Smoking Message

I recently came upon this blurb on a UPenn Annenberg School site about an interesting fMRI pilot study:

Functional MRI of Brain Response to Anti-Smoking Advertisements
Daniel Langleben, MD

This is a pilot study for the larger center project titled Evaluating Anti-Tobacco public service announcements (PSAs). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the feasibility of using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to study brain response to anti-smoking PSAs. In preliminary studies, researchers used perfusion fMRI to detect increased activity in the components of the brain limbic system in opiate-dependent patients in response to a ten-minute heroin-related video. The results indicated that (1) Brain response to media can be measured with fMRI; (2) Brain response to media varies across target audiences and (3) Specific structures mediating strong interest could be activated in the target population but not the controls. Collaborators at Penn have also used fMRI to detect differential response to the emotional image content. This pilot study takes an important first step towards exploring the feasibility of using magnetic resonance signal as a marker of cognitive (e.g. attention) and emotional (e.g. arousal) responses to different PSAs. Results from this would allow interpretation of the brain response to a PSA in terms of known brain localization of cognitive functions.

Emotion and the Ultimatum Game (Blumenthal)

Most people, I think, are familiar with the two-person “ultimatum game.”  Briefly, one party is responsible for allocating a fixed sum (e.g., $10) between herself and another party, who may accept the proposed allocation (in which case it stands) or may reject it (in which neither party receives anything).  A purely utilitarian calculus would suggest that the offeror offer a penny and keep the remainder, as under those circumstances both parties are objectively better off.  Responding indignantly to perceived inequity, however, most receivers reject any offer less than 20% of the fixed sum, even though they themselves are consequently worse off.  E.g., Alan G. Sanfrey, et al., The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game, 300 Sci. 1755 (2003) (noting that neurological areas associated with “disgust” are activated in offerees who reject low offers).  As a result, offerors tend instead to offer approximately 40-50% of the “pot.”

Many, including myself, have talked about such findings in terms of (a) implications for fairness, “bounded self-interest,” altruism, etc.; and/or (b) links between emotions and moral reasoning/behavior.  So I was very interested in recent findings suggesting that such rejection may indeed reflect an offeree’s negative emotional response, but that an alternative opportunity to express that negative emotion leads to “ordinary” rational, self-interested responses.  That is, when an offeree is given another way to express her sense of unfairness—e.g., by writing a note to the offeror—that simple act of expression seems to dissipate the emotion and yield a more utilitarian calculus.  (Incidentally, there were a couple interesting conference presentations associating more "automatic"--that is, more default--moral judgments with more utilitarian judgments, and more "conscious"--that is, longer, more consciously reasoned, more emotional--moral judgments with more deontological judgments.  Very interesting.)

I think those findings have some interesting broader implications: (1) setting some boundary conditions on the ultimatum game itself; (2) setting similar conditions on the inferences to be drawn from previous ultimatum game findings; (3) “procedural justice” implications, in terms of potential dangers of giving people a “voice” in expressing their feelings about legal proceedings.

The findings were presented at the ISRE conference I mention in some previous blogs.  Erte Xiao (George Mason), Emotion Expression in Human Punishment Behavior.  A version may have been published in 2005, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Thanks, Jurisdynamics

Jim Chen recently launched a new blog, more precisely a collection of blogs, called Jurisdynamics, where he will share the main stage with Dan Farber, J.B. Ruhl, and a writer by the name of "Gil Grantmore" (I'm pleased to see that Jim and Gil are teaming up on this project--see here for more information.)  The site will have a variety of sub-blogs, including one called "biolaw," which will discuss the many ways in which law is informed by the life sciences.

As the most recent Jurisdynamic Idol, you'll find that I'm entirely unbiased when I encourage you to check out the site.  Here's part of Jim's description of the overarching project from an early post:

This blog openly embraces a dynamic model of legal change. Jurisdynamics describes the interplay between legal responses to exogenous change and the law's own endogenous capacity for adaptation. The world that law tries to govern has become "so vast that fully to comprehend it would require an almost universal knowledge ranging from" economics and the natural sciences "to the niceties of the legislative, judicial and administrative processes of government." Queensboro Farms Prods., Inc. v. Wickard, 137 F.2d 969, 975 (2d Cir. 1943). Within the realm of legal scholarship, this blog aspires to the goal that historian David Christian set out for his discipline: "that the appropriate time scale for the study of history may be the whole of time." David Christian, The Case for "Big History," 2 J. World Hist. 223, 223 (1991). Jurisdynamics will present the case for "big law," for the proposition that the substantive scale on which law should be studied, taught, and learned is the entirety of human experience.