Neuroethics & Law Blog

'Tis the Season Not to Introspect

Timothy D. Wilson, in yesterday's NYT, wrote an op-ed on the dangers of excessive introspection.  A la Blink, Wilson describes some of his research that supports the accuracy and predictive power of our intuititive, pre-analytic inclinations:

In a study I conducted with Dolores Kraft, a clinical psychologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and Dana Dunn, a social psychologist at Moravian College in Pennsylvania, people in one group were asked to list the reasons their relationship with a romantic partner was going the way it was, and then rate how satisfied they were with the relationship. People in another group were asked to rate their satisfaction without any analysis; they just gave their gut reactions.

It might seem that the people who thought about the specifics would be best at figuring out how they really felt, and that their satisfaction ratings would thus do the best job of predicting the outcome of their relationships.

In fact, we found the reverse. It was the people in the "gut feeling" group whose ratings predicted whether they were still dating their partner several months later. As for the navel gazers, their satisfaction ratings did not predict the outcome of their relationships at all. Our conclusion? Too much analysis can confuse people about how they really feel. There are severe limits to what we can discover through self-reflection, and trying to explain the unexplainable does not lead to a sudden parting of the seas with our hidden thoughts and feelings revealed like flopping fish.

Ethan Lieb responds over at Prawfsblawg.

Remorse in Children

Martha Grace Duncan (Law, Emory) has posted 'So Young And So Untender' Remorseless Children and the Expectations of the Law (Columbia Law Review, Vol. 102, p. 1469, 2002) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

A nine-year-old speaks with apparent callousness as he walks by the body of the girl he has killed. A fourteen-year-old jokes about “body parts in her pocket” after bashing in her mother’s head with a candlestick holder. And a fifteen-year-old laughingly names his accomplice “Homicide” after participating in a robbery that culminated in the victim’s death. Seemingly remorseless acts such as these can have a crucial impact on the way a child or adolescent fares in the juvenile justice or criminal system. Yet, when one looks closely at what the courts interpret as indicators of remorselessness - taking into account psychological findings about the developmental stages, sociological theories about the code of the street, and literary portrayals of the paradoxes of the human mind - these indicators often appear ambiguous, the courts’ interpretations problematic.

This article employs psychology, sociology, and literature to investigate the expectation of remorse in the juvenile and criminal justice systems. More specifically, it presents seven in-depth case studies of juveniles who were charged with murder or attempted murder and whose apparent lack of remorse played a salient role in the legal process. Through these case studies, the article challenges the law’s assumption that any decent, redeemable person, regardless of age, will exhibit sorrow and contrition after committing a heinous crime.

Beyond challenging the courts’ ability to interpret the emotional state of a juvenile, the article questions the validity of remorse as a predictor of future character. Drawing on Biblical and literary examples and the psychoanalytic theory of the superego, the article suggests that remorse, as the most agonizing form of guilt, may actually undermine the ability to “turn one’s life around” and begin anew.

(via Legal Theory Blog).

The Google Brain

When I was at  Stanford Law School, I attended a presentation on the future of the Internet.  Sitting next to me in the audience were a couple of unknown Internet entrepreneurs, including Sergey Brin, wearing t-shirts that said, "Google".  The internet boom was in full swing, but almost no one had yet heard of Google.  When I asked them about their company, they told me that Google was the favorite search engine of Gerhard Casper, then-president of Stanford University....  Despite the endorsement of this esteemed constitutional scholar, I failed to plead with them to let me invest in their company.  And I've been regretting it every since!

All of that leads me to point you to this article on how we use Google as an auxiliary brain.  Here are some comments from the article on Google and human memory:

Do these experiences mean that Google is fundamentally changing our notion of memory? Plato wrote: "For this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it; they will not exercise their memories." He wasn't talking about Google; he was talking about writing.

Not bothering to commit trivia to memory isn't a character flaw; it's part of a long-ongoing process, academics say. "Memorizing is not something that people typically have done since the invention of writing," says Fernando Pereira, chairman of the computer and information science department at the University of Pennsylvania.

And despite Plato's complaints, even writing didn't change the process of memory, just what we chose to remember, says Pam Frese, a professor of anthropology at The College of Wooster in Ohio.

In pre-literate societies, what was worth remembering might be complex information about who can marry whom, or the history of long-term trading relationships, she says. Today, "the emphasis on what kinds of knowledge need to be remembered has shifted."

And here's the helpful post from Greg Lastowka at Concurring Opinions, which directed me to the article and offers some analysis.

Delusions of Control

MindHacks references an interesting paper by Chris Frith, entitled "The Self in Action: Lessons from Delusions of Control."  Here is the abstract, with more info. available at PubMed:

Patients with delusions of control are abnormally aware of the sensory consequences of their actions and have difficulty with on-line corrections of movement. As a result they do not feel in control of their movements. At the same time they are strongly aware of the action being intentional. This leads them to believe that their actions are being controlled by an external agent. In contrast, the normal mark of the self in action is that we have very little experience of it. Most of the time we are not aware of the sensory consequences of our actions or of the various subtle corrections that we make during the course of goal-directed actions. We know that we are agents and that we are successfully causing the world to change. But as actors we move through the world like shadows glimpsed only occasional from the corner of an eye.

Human-Mice Chimeras

The AP reports here on the injection of human embryonic stem cells into "the brains of 14-day-old rodent embryos."  The article states that "the work adds to the growing ethical concerns of mixing human and animal cells when it comes to stem cell and cloning research. After all, mice are 97.5 percent genetically identical to humans."  (As I noted in this piece, it is unclear what significance this 97.5% statistic is meant to have.)

Here's how the article concludes:

Stem cell researchers argue that mixing human and animal cells is the only way to advance the field because it's far too risky to experiment on people; so little is known about stem cells.

"The experiments have to be done, which does mean human cells into non-human cells," said Dr. Evan Snyder, a stem cell researcher at the Burnham Institute in San Diego. "You don't work out the issues on your child or your grandmother. You want to work this out in an animal first."

Snyder is injecting human embryonic stem cells into monkeys and is convinced that there's little danger.

"It's true that there is a huge amount of similarity, but the difference are huge," Snyder said. "You will never ever have a little human trapped inside a mouse or monkey's body."

The Psychology of Circumstantial Evidence

Kevin Jon Heller (Law, University of Georgia) has posted "The Paradox of Circumstantial Evidence" to SSRN.  Here is the abstract: 

Empirical research indicates that jurors routinely overvalue direct evidence (eyewitness identifications, confessions) and undervalue circumstantial evidence (DNA, fingerprints, etc.) when making verdict choices, even though false-conviction statistics indicate that the latter is actually far more reliable than the former. The traditional explanation of this paradox, based on the probability-threshold model of jury decision-making, is that jurors simply do not understand circumstantial evidence and thus routinely underestimate its effect on the objective probability of the defendant's guilt. That may be true in some situations, but it fails to account for what is known in cognitive psychology as the "Wells Effect": the puzzling fact that jurors are likely to acquit in circumstantial cases even when they know the objective probability of the defendant's guilt is sufficient to convict.

This speculative Article attempts to explain why jurors find circumstantial evidence so psychologically troubling. Drawing on a wide variety of psychological research into judgment and decision-making - Kahneman & Tversky's simulation heuristic in particular - it argues that jurors decide whether to acquit in a criminal case not through mechanical probability calculations, but on the basis of their ability to visualize a scenario in which the defendant is factually innocent. The Article then examines the basic epistemological differences between direct and circumstantial evidence and shows how those differences normally make it easier for jurors to visualize a factually-exculpatory scenario in circumstantial cases. Finally, the Article concludes by discussing how an ease-of-simulation model of jury decision-making improves our understanding of how and why false verdicts occur.

Prediction: Experts Predict Poorly

Louis Menand reviews Philip Tetlock's new book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? in a recent New Yorker.  Menand highlights some data and anecdotes that suggest that experts often predict phenomena no better than laypeople; sometimes, experts do worse than one would by randomly guessing.  Here are some excerpts:

Tetlock got a statistical handle on his task by putting most of the forecasting questions into a “three possible futures” form. The respondents were asked to rate the probability of three alternative outcomes: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). And he measured his experts on two dimensions: how good they were at guessing probabilities (did all the things they said had an x per cent chance of happening happen x per cent of the time?), and how accurate they were at predicting specific outcomes. The results were unimpressive. On the first scale, the experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes—if they had given each possible future a thirty-three-per-cent chance of occurring. Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.

Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. . . .

People who are not experts in the psychology of expertise are likely (I predict) to find Tetlock’s results a surprise and a matter for concern. For psychologists, though, nothing could be less surprising. “Expert Political Judgment” is just one of more than a hundred studies that have pitted experts against statistical or actuarial formulas, and in almost all of those studies the people either do no better than the formulas or do worse. In one study, college counsellors were given information about a group of high-school students and asked to predict their freshman grades in college. The counsellors had access to test scores, grades, the results of personality and vocational tests, and personal statements from the students, whom they were also permitted to interview. Predictions that were produced by a formula using just test scores and grades were more accurate. There are also many studies showing that expertise and experience do not make someone a better reader of the evidence. In one, data from a test used to diagnose brain damage were given to a group of clinical psychologists and their secretaries. The psychologists’ diagnoses were no better than the secretaries’.

Insanity and the Constitution

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal of an Arizona insanity case.  In that case, the defendant argued, inter alia, that : (1) his Due Process rights were infringed because Arizona's insanity law does not exculpate where a defendant does not know "the nature and quality of his acts" (this is the first prong of the famed M'Naghten test); and (2) his due process rights were violated when the trial court did not hear certain allegedly exculpatory evidence that would show that he did not have the requisite mens rea for the crime due to his mental illness.

SCOTUS blog posts here, and the Volokh Conspiracy posts with comments here and here, and offers this link to the unpublished Arizona court of appeals decision where key language starts around p.15.  The cert petition is available on Westlaw at 2005 WL 3295166.

Bat Brain (and Testes)

New Scientist has this article on the relationship between the size of brains and testes in various species of bats.  Here's an excerpt:

The analysis of 334 species of bat found that in species where the females were promiscuous, the males had evolved larger testes but had relatively small brains. In species, where the females were monogamous, the situation was reversed. Male fidelity appeared to have no influence over testes or brain size.

Both brain tissue and sperm cells require a lot of metabolic energy to produce and maintain. The different species appear to have evolved a preference for developing one organ more than the other, presumably determined by which will help them produce more offspring.

“An extraordinary range of testes mass was documented across bat species - from 0.12% to 8.4% of body mass. That exceeds the range of any other mammalian order,” says Scott Pitnick, from Syracuse University in New York, US, one of the research team. Primate testes vary between species from 0.02% and 0.75% of body mass.

Cyber-Neuroethics

Greg Lastowka, guest blogging at Concurring Opinions, posts here on human-robot interactions, and points to helpful references at the University of Washington's Value Sensitive Design Research Lab, including papers on human-aibo interaction.  Here's a snippet from his post:

For instance, do people perceive any ethical issues with regard to the treatment of a robotic dog? Most don't, though some do. This is from a message board:

WHAT!? They Actualy THREW AWAY aibo, as in the GARBAGE?!! That is outragious! That is so sick to me! Goes right up there with Putting puppies in a bag and than burying them! OHH I feel sick...

But while (I think) most would agree it is silly to treat an AIBO even remotely like a dog, is there anything else to say about AIBO ethics? The authors state that AIBO owners seem to garner some of the psychological benefits of having a pet from a relationship with an AIBO -- yet most feel entirely free to ignore it whenever is convenient or desirabe to do so. Which is interesting, considering that we'll soon have generations of children growing up with richly interactive electronic companions as toys. What might they learn from the availability of such switch on/switch off "real" imaginary friends?

And if you want a legal-doctrinal spin on these questions, see Ian Kerr's recent paper on e-commerce law: Bots, Babes and the Californication of Commerce: Are we tricked into buying things by electronic babes?

Law & the Doctrine of Double Effect

HealthLawProf Blog posts three recent law review articles/manuscripts related to the doctrine of double effect over here.