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[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
[Judge’s voice: Members of the jury, do you have a verdict?]
When it comes to making decisions about innocence and guilt, the human brain acts as both judge and jury. Now a study published in the journal Neuron shows that, just like in the courtroom, the brain’s judge and jury sit in separate places.
When someone’s put on trial, two types of decisions have to be made. First, is the person guilty? And second, what punishment, if any, does that person deserve? Scientists at Vanderbilt University got to wondering how the brain actually makes those two different decisions. So they used functional MRI to monitor the brain activity of subjects as they read about various crimes, and decided how severely the perpetrators should be punished, or whether they should be punished at all.
What the researchers found is that a brain region involved in analytical thought was most active when the subject was deciding whether the perpetrator was actually guilty. But a different area, one more in tune with emotion, weighed in on how to make the punishment fit the crime. The study was funded by the MacArthur Foundation Project on Law and Neuroscience, and it suggests that when it comes to crime and punishment, we may be impartial but we’re not without passion.
—Karen Hopkin
Announcer: For more on the MacArthur Foundation’s Law and Neuroscience Project, check out the November 27th, 2007, episode of Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American, at SciAm.com/podcast
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3 Comments
Add CommentHow do we know that the first or rational brain's decision as to guilt or innocence is not being re-examined by the emotional brain in light of the requisite punishment possibly being unfit for the severity of the alleged crime? In other words, couldn't we be looking at a "jury nullification" effect in the brain as well?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe crime itself establishes an emotional climate personal to the juror. This bias must influence the seemingly objective determination of guilt or innocence. The idea that cognition is separate from emotion and memory exists as the illusion of consciousness. Decisions are made of whole cloth, not by the weaving of threads.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe subjects in the experiment were not exactly jurors as they had no actual responsibility for the consequences of any decisions. But even so, the weaving of the cloth is shown by this experiment to require a confluence of looms.
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