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Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
Punishment; neuroscience; judging; decision-making; sentencing; law and neuroscience; brain imaging; behavioral biology; cognitive psychology
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The Neural Correlates Of Third-Party Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Joshua Buckholtz, Christopher L. Asplund, Paul E. Dux, David H. Zald, John C. Gore, Rene Marois
The Neural Correlates Of Third-Party Punishment, Owen D. Jones, Joshua Buckholtz, Christopher L. Asplund, Paul E. Dux, David H. Zald, John C. Gore, Rene Marois
Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications
This article reports the discovery, from the first full-scale law and neuroscience experiment, of the brain activity underlying punishment decisions.
We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain activity of subjects as they read hypothetical scenarios about harm-causing protagonists and then decided whether to punish and, if so, how much.
The key variables were: a) presence or absence of excusing, justifying, or otherwise mitigating factors (such as acting under duress); and b) harm severity (which ranged from a stolen CD to a rape/murder/torture combination).
Findings include:
(1) Analytic and emotional brain circuitries are jointly involved, yet quite separately …