From moral to legal judgment: the influence of normative context in lawyers and other academics

Decisional brain of lawyers at the workplace. A neurolaw pilot study

This pilot study investigated legal and non-legal professionals' decision process during a typical working day. During self-evaluated highly relevant decisions (rated through a daily diary), the two groups were asked to wear the Muse™ Headband to record their electrophysiological (EEG) activity in terms of frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha and beta). EEG cognitive findings displayed a generally increased beta power in the anterior frontal region (mainly in the right than left) for both groups during highly relevant decisions. Significantly results were also found for the legal professionals' group, for which a decrease of alpha power was found in the left compared to right frontal cortex. Furthermore, a decreased alpha power and increased delta and theta power in the right compared to left Temporo-Parietal Junction was observed in the legal professionals when taking highly relevant decisions. This pilot study suggested a specific EEG pattern for legal professionals while taking highly relevant decisions.

Explicit and implicit markers of fairness preeminence in criminal judges

Achieving justice could be considered a complex social decision-making scenario. Despite the relevance of social decisions for legal contexts, these processes have still not been explored for individuals who work as criminal judges dispensing justice. To bridge the gap, we used a complex social decision-making task (Ultimatum game) and tracked a heart rate variability measurement: the square root of the mean squared differences of successive NN intervals (RMSSD) at their baseline (as an implicit measurement that tracks emotion regulation behavior) for criminal judges (n = 24) and a control group (n = 27). Our results revealed that, compared to controls, judges were slower and rejected a bigger proportion of unfair offers. Moreover, the rate of rejections and the reaction times were predicted by higher RMSSD scores for the judges. This study provides evidence about the impact of legal background and expertise in complex social decision-making. Our results contribute to understanding how expertise can shape criminal judges' social behaviors and pave the way for promising new research into the cognitive and physiological factors associated with social decision-making.

Intrinsic functional connectivity of the frontoparietal network predicts inter-individual differences in the propensity for costly third-party punishment

Humans are motivated to give norm violators their just deserts through costly punishment even as unaffected third parties (i.e., third-party punishment, TPP). A great deal of individual variability exists in costly punishment; however, how this variability particularly in TPP is represented by the brain's intrinsic network architecture remains elusive. Here, we examined whether inter-individual differences in the propensity for TPP can be predicted based on resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) combining an economic TPP game with task-free functional neuroimaging and a multivariate prediction framework. Our behavioral results revealed that TPP punishment increased with the severity of unfairness for offers. People with higher TPP propensity punished more harshly across norm-violating scenarios. Our neuroimaging findings showed RSFC within the frontoparietal network predicted individual differences in TPP propensity. Our findings contribute to understanding the neural fingerprint for an individual's propensity to costly punish strangers, and shed some light on how social norm enforcement behaviors are represented by the brain's intrinsic network architecture.

Ethical Management of Artificial Intelligence

With artificial intelligence (AI) becoming increasingly capable of handling highly complex tasks, many AI-enabled products and services are granted a higher autonomy of decision-making, potentially exercising diverse influences on individuals and societies. While organizations and researchers have repeatedly shown the blessings of AI for humanity, serious AI-related abuses and incidents have raised pressing ethical concerns. Consequently, researchers from different disciplines widely acknowledge an ethical discourse on AI. However, managers—eager to spark ethical considerations throughout their organizations—receive limited support on how they may establish and manage AI ethics. Although research is concerned with technological-related ethics in organizations, research on the ethical management of AI is limited. Against this background, the goals of this article are to provide a starting point for research on AI-related ethical concerns and to highlight future research opportunities. We propose an ethical management of AI (EMMA) framework, focusing on three perspectives: managerial decision making, ethical considerations, and macro- as well as micro-environmental dimensions. With the EMMA framework, we provide researchers with a starting point to address the managing the ethical aspects of AI.

From Neuroscience to Law: Bridging the Gap

Since our moral and legal judgments are focused on our decisions and actions, one would expect information about the neural underpinnings of human decision-making and action-production to have a significant bearing on those judgments. However, despite the wealth of empirical data, and the public attention it has attracted in the past few decades, the results of neuroscientific research have had relatively little influence on legal practice. It is here argued that this is due, at least partly, to the discussion on the relationship of the neurosciences and law mixing up a number of separate issues that have different relevance on our moral and legal judgments. The approach here is hierarchical; more and less feasible ways in which neuroscientific data could inform such judgments are separated from each other. The neurosciences and other physical views on human behavior and decision-making do have the potential to have an impact on our legal reasoning. However, this happens in various different ways, and too often appeal to any neural data is assumed to be automatically relevant to shaping our moral and legal judgments. Our physicalist intuitions easily favor neural-level explanations to mental-level ones. But even if you were to subscribe to some reductionist variant of physicalism, it would not follow that all neural data should be automatically relevant to our moral and legal reasoning. However, the neurosciences can give us indirect evidence for reductive physicalism, which can then lead us to challenge the very idea of free will. Such a development can, ultimately, also have repercussions on law and legal practice.

The impact of legal expertise on moral decision-making biases

Traditional and mainstream legal frameworks conceive law primarily as a purely rational practice, free from affect or intuition. However, substantial evidence indicates that human decision-making depends upon diverse biases. We explored the manifestation of these biases through comparisons among 45 criminal judges, 60 criminal attorneys, and 64 controls. We examined whether these groups' decision-making patterns were influenced by (a) the information on the transgressor's mental state, (b) the use of gruesome language in harm descriptions, and (c) ongoing physiological states. Judges and attorneys were similar to controls in that they overestimated the damage caused by intentional harm relative to accidental harm. However, judges and attorneys were less biased towards punishments and harm severity ratings to accidental harms. Similarly, they were less influenced in their decisions by either language manipulations or physiological arousal. Our findings suggest that specific expertise developed in legal settings can attenuate some pervasive biases in moral decision processes.

Real Neurolaw in the Netherlands: The Role of the Developing Brain in the New Adolescent Criminal Law

Previous publications discussed the conditions under which courts admitted or could admit neurotechnological evidence like brain scans. There were also first attempts to investigate legal decisions neuroscientifically. The present paper analyzes a different way in which neuroscience already influenced the law: The legal justification of the new Dutch adolescent criminal law explicitly mentions findings on brain development to justify a higher maximum age for the application of juvenile criminal law than before. The lawmaker’s reasoning is compared with the neuroscientific studies on which it is based. In particular, three neurodevelopmental publications quoted by the Dutch Council for the Administration of Criminal Justice and Protection of Juveniles to justify that adolescents can be legally less responsible are analyzed in detail. The paper also addresses possibilities under which brain research could improve legal decision-making in the future. One important aspect turns out to be that neuroscience should not only matter on the level of justification, but also provide better instruments on the individual level of application.

Discovering Humanoid Robot Consciousness Within Caring Science

Why would humanoid caring robots (HCRs) need consciousness? Because HCRs need to be gentle like human beings. In addition, HCRs need to be trusted by their patients, and have a shared understanding of patients' life experiences, their illnesses, and their treatments. HCRs need to express “competency as caring” to naturally convey their nursing as healing to patients and their families. HCRs should also have self-consciousness and express their emotions without needing inducement by persons' behaviors. Artificial “brains” and artificial consciousness are therefore necessary for HCRs. The purpose of this article was to explore humanoid consciousness and the possibilities of a technologically enhanced future with HCRs as participants in the care of human persons.

When morality opposes the law: An fMRI investigation into punishment judgments for crimes with good intentions

In judicial practice, morally right but legally wrong instances usually pose significant challenges for legal decision makers. To examine the cognitive and neural foundations of legal judgments in criminal cases involving apparent moral conflicts, we scanned 30 female participants during punishment judgments for crimes committed with good intentions. The behavioral results confirmed that moral acceptability was significantly correlated with the punishment ratings only in the good-intentioned crimes. The fMRI data mainly revealed that the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) plays special roles in processing criminal offenders' state of mind and that the right dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (rDLPFC) plays roles in resolving moral conflicts involved in legal judgments. Specifically, we found that compared to the bad-intentioned scenarios, the good-intentioned scenarios evoked greater activities during the postreading stage in the brain area of the rTPJ and that a signal increase in the rTPJ was associated with more lenient penalty judgments in the good-intentioned scenarios. Furthermore, reading crime scenarios with good intentions elicited stronger activation in the rdlPFC, which showed enhanced functional connectivity with the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Overall, our study sheds some light on the neurocognitive underpinnings of legal judgments in special criminal cases and enhances our understanding of the relationship between legal and moral judgments.

Neural correlates of moral judgment in pedophilia

Pedophilia is a sexual preference that is often associated with child sex offending (CSO). Sexual urges towards prepubescent children and specifically acting upon those urges are universally regarded as immoral. However, up until now, it is completely unknown whether moral processing of sexual offenses is altered in pedophiles. A total of 31 pedophilic men and 19 healthy controls were assessed by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in combination with a moral judgment paradigm consisting of 36 scenarios describing different types of offenses.

Scenarios depicting sexual offenses against children compared to those depicting adults were associated with higher pattern of activation in the left temporo-parietal-junction (TPJ) and left posterior insular cortex, the posterior cingulate gyrus as well as the precuneus in controls relative to pedophiles, and vice versa. Moreover, brain activation in these areas were positively associated with ratings of moral reprehensibility and negatively associated with decision durations, but only in controls. Brain activation, found in key areas related to the broad network of moral judgment, theory of mind and (socio-)moral disgust - point to different moral processing of sexual offenses in pedophilia in general. The lack of associations between brain activation and behavioral responses in pedophiles further suggest a biased response pattern or dissected implicit valuation processes.

tDCS Over DLPFC Leads to Less Utilitarian Response in Moral-Personal Judgment

The profound nature of moral judgment has been discussed and debated for centuries. When facing the trade-off between pursuing moral rights and seeking better consequences, most people make different moral choices between two kinds of dilemmas. Such differences were explained by the dual-process theory involving an automatic emotional response and a controlled application of utilitarian decision-rules. In neurocognitive studies, the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been demonstrated to play an important role in cognitive “rational” control processes in moral dilemmas. However, the profile of results across studies is not entirely consistent. Although one transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) study revealed that disrupting the right DLPFC led to less utilitarian responses, other TMS studies indicated that inhibition of the right DLPFC led to more utilitarian choices. Moreover, the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is essential for its function of integrating belief and intention in moral judgment, which is related to the emotional process according to the dual-process theory. Relatively few studies have reported the causal relationship between TPJ and participants' moral responses, especially in moral dilemmas. In the present study, we aimed to demonstrate a direct link between the neural and behavioral results by application of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in the bilateral DLPFC or TPJ of our participants. We observed that activating the right DLPFC as well as inhibiting the left DLPFC led to less utilitarian judgments, especially in moral-personal conditions, indicating that the right DLPFC plays an essential role, not only through its function of moral reasoning but also through its information integrating process in moral judgments. It was also revealed that altering the excitability of the bilateral TPJ using tDCS negligibly altered the moral response in non-moral, moral-impersonal and moral-personal dilemmas, indicating that bilateral TPJ may have little influence over moral judgments in moral dilemmas.

Common and distinct neural networks involved in fMRI studies investigating morality: an ALE meta-analysis

Morality is an important social construct necessary for understanding what is right and wrong. Neuroimaging studies investigating morality have used a wide variety of paradigms and implicated many different brain areas. Yet, it remains unclear whether differences amongst morality tasks are the cause for such heterogeneous findings. Therefore, in the present study, a series of activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses were conducted on 123 datasets (inclusive of 1963 participants) to address this question. The ALE meta-analyses revealed a series of common brain areas associated with all moral tasks, including medial prefrontal cortex, lateral orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, temporoparietal junction, and precuneus. However, individual and contrast analyses also revealed unique networks associated with each moral modality, suggesting that different moral tasks recruit specialised brain regions.

The neural correlates of moral decision-making: A systematic review and meta-analysis of moral evaluations and response decision judgements

The aims of this systematic review were to determine: (a) which brain areas are consistently more active when making (i) moral response decisions, defined as choosing a response to a moral dilemma, or deciding whether to accept a proposed solution, or (ii) moral evaluations, defined as judging the appropriateness of another's actions in a moral dilemma, rating moral statements as right or wrong, or identifying important moral issues; and (b) shared and significantly different activation patterns for these two types of moral judgements. A systematic search of the literature returned 28 experiments. Activation likelihood estimate analysis identified the brain areas commonly more active for moral response decisions and for moral evaluations. Conjunction analysis revealed shared activation for both types of moral judgement in the left middle temporal gyrus, cingulate gyrus, and medial frontal gyrus. Contrast analyses found no significant clusters of increased activation for the moral evaluations-moral response decisions contrast, but found that moral response decisions additionally activated the left and right middle temporal gyrus and the right precuneus. Making one's own moral decisions involves different brain areas compared to judging the moral actions of others, implying that these judgements may involve different processes.

Effect of professional expertise and exposure to everyday life decision-making on moral choices

Moral sense is defined as a feeling of fairness or unfairness of an action that knowingly causes harm to people other than the subject. It is crucial in determining human behavior and becomes pivotal in operational environments. Here we assessed whether professional daily life experience in an operational environment affects moral judgment by asking 41 military pilots of the Italian Air Force (P) and 69 controls (C) to solve 40 moral dilemmas. We found that P gave more morally acceptable utilitarian responses to moral dilemmas. Interestingly, men and women in P equally accepted utilitarian resolutions of moral dilemmas, whereas in C women were less prone than men to accept utilitarian responses. We conclude that professional daily life experience of P, in an operational environment, affects moral judgment and mitigates gender predisposition towards moral dilemmas.

Effective connectivity of brain regions underlying third-party punishment: Functional MRI and Granger causality evidence

Third-party punishment (TPP) for norm violations is an essential deterrent in large-scale human societies, and builds on two essential cognitive functions: evaluating legal responsibility and determining appropriate punishment. Despite converging evidence that TPP is mediated by a specific set of brain regions, little is known about their effective connectivity (direction and strength of connections). Applying parametric event-related functional MRI in conjunction with multivariate Granger causality analysis, we asked healthy participants to estimate how much punishment a hypothetical perpetrator deserves for intentionally committing criminal offenses varying in levels of harm. Our results confirmed that TPP legal decisions are based on two domain-general networks: the mentalizing network for evaluating legal responsibility and the central-executive network for determining appropriate punishment. Further, temporal pole (TP) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (PFC) emerged as hubs of the mentalizing network, uniquely generating converging output connections to ventromedial PFC, temporo-parietal junction, and posterior cingulate. In particular, dorsomedial PFC received inputs only from TP and both its activation and its connectivity to dorsolateral PFC correlated with degree of punishment. This supports the hypothesis that dorsomedial PFC acts as the driver of the TPP activation pattern, leading to the decision on the appropriate punishment. In conclusion, these results advance our understanding of the organizational elements of the TPP brain networks and provide better insights into the mental states of judges and jurors tasked with blaming and punishing legal wrongs.

Defeasible reasoning with legal conditionals

Valid conclusions can be defeated if people can think of conditions that prevent the consequent to occur although the antecedent is given. The goal of the present research was to investigate how people consider these conditions when reasoning with legal conditionals such as "If a person kills another human, then this person should be punished for manslaughter." In Experiments 1 and 2 legal conditionals were presented to participants together with exculpatory circumstances, i.e., counterexamples. The participants' task was to decide whether they would adhere to the legal conditional rule and punish the offender. Participants were either lawyers (i.e., advanced law students and graduate lawyers) or legal laypeople. We found that laypeople often ignore exculpatory circumstances and adhere to the conditional rule when offences evoked high levels of moral outrage. Lawyers did not show this effect. In Experiment 3 laypeople showed difficulties even when asked to simply imagine exculpatory circumstances for highly morally outrageous offences. Results provide new evidence for the role of emotions--like moral outrage--in the consideration of counterexamples to legal conditionals.

From Blame to Punishment: Disrupting Prefrontal Cortex Activity Reveals Norm Enforcement Mechanisms

The social welfare provided by cooperation depends on the enforcement of social norms. Determining blameworthiness and assigning a deserved punishment are two cognitive cornerstones of norm enforcement. Although prior work has implicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in norm-based judgments, the relative contribution of this region to blameworthiness and punishment decisions remains poorly understood. Here, we used repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and fMRI to determine the specific role of DLPFC function in norm-enforcement behavior. DLPFC rTMS reduced punishment for wrongful acts without affecting blameworthiness ratings, and fMRI revealed punishment-selective DLPFC recruitment, suggesting that these two facets of norm-based decision making are neurobiologically dissociable. Finally, we show that DLPFC rTMS affects punishment decision making by altering the integration of information about culpability and harm. Together, these findings reveal a selective, causal role for DLPFC in norm enforcement: representational integration of the distinct information streams used to make punishment decisions.

Neural signatures of third-party punishment: evidence from penetrating traumatic brain injury

The ability to survive within a cooperative society depends on impartial third-party punishment (TPP) of social norm violations. Two cognitive mechanisms have been postulated as necessary for the successful completion of TPP: evaluation of legal responsibility and selection of a suitable punishment given the magnitude of the crime. Converging neuroimaging research suggests two supporting domain-general networks; a mentalizing network for evaluation of legal responsibility and a central-executive network for determination of punishment. A whole-brain voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping approach was used in conjunction with a rank-order TPP task to identify brain regions necessary for TPP in a large sample of patients with penetrating traumatic brain injury. Patients who demonstrated atypical TPP had specific lesions in core regions of the mentalizing (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex [PFC], ventromedial PFC) and central-executive (bilateral dorsolateral PFC, right intraparietal sulcus) networks. Altruism and executive functioning (concept formation skills) were significant predictors of TPP: altruism was uniquely associated with TPP in patients with lesions in right dorsolateral PFC and executive functioning was uniquely associated with TPP in individuals with lesions in left PFC. Our findings contribute to the extant literature to support underlying neural networks associated with TPP, with specific brain-behavior causal relationships confirming recent functional neuroimaging research.

Neurofunctional correlates of ethical, food-related decision-making

For consumers today, the perceived ethicality of a food’s production method can be as important a purchasing consideration as its price. Still, few studies have examined how, neurofunctionally, consumers are making ethical, food-related decisions. We examined how consumers’ ethical concern about a food’s production method may relate to how, neurofunctionally, they make decisions whether to purchase that food. Forty-six participants completed a measure of the extent to which they took ethical concern into consideration when making food-related decisions. They then underwent a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans while performing a food-related decision-making (FRDM) task. During this task, they made 56 decisions whether to purchase a food based on either its price (i.e., high or low, the “price condition”) or production method (i.e., with or without the use of cages, the “production method condition”), but not both. For 23 randomly selected participants, we performed an exploratory, whole-brain correlation between ethical concern and differential neurofunctional activity in the price and production method conditions. Ethical concern correlated negatively and significantly with differential neurofunctional activity in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC). For the remaining 23 participants, we performed a confirmatory, region-of-interest (ROI) correlation between the same variables, using an 8-mm3 volume situated in the left dlPFC. Again, the variables correlated negatively and significantly. This suggests, when making ethical, food-related decisions, the more consumers take ethical concern into consideration, the less they may rely on neurofunctional activity in the left dlPFC, possibly because making these decisions is more routine for them, and therefore a more perfunctory process requiring fewer cognitive resources.

Evaluation of the legal consequences of action affects neural activity and emotional experience during the resolution of moral dilemmas

In any modern society killing is regarded as a severe violation of the legal codes that is subjected to penal judgment. Therefore, it is likely that people take legal consequences into account when deciding about the hypothetical killing of one person in classic moral dilemmas, with legal concerns contributing to decision-making. In particular, by differing for the degree of intentionality and emotional salience, Footbridge- and Trolley-type dilemmas might promote differential assignment of blame and punishment while implicating the same severity of harm. The present study was aimed at comparing the neural activity, subjective emotional reactions, and behavioral choices in two groups of participants who either took (Legal group) or did not take (No Legal group) legal consequences into account when deciding on Footbridge-type and Trolley-type moral dilemmas. Stimulus- and response-locked ERPs were measured to investigate the neural activity underlying two separate phases of the decision process. No difference in behavioral choices was found between groups. However, the No Legal group reported greater overall emotional impact, associated with lower preparation for action, suggesting greater conflict between alternative motor responses representing the different decision choices. In contrast, the Legal group showed an overall dampened affective experience during decision-making associated with greater overall action readiness and intention to act, reflecting lower conflict in responding. On these bases, we suggest that in moral dilemmas legal consequences of actions provide a sort of reference point on which people can rely to support a decision, independent of dilemma type.

Disgust and biological descriptions bias logical reasoning during legal decision-making

Legal decisions often require logical reasoning about the mental states of people who perform gruesome behaviors. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine how brain regions implicated in logical reasoning are modulated by emotion and social cognition during legal decision-making. Participants read vignettes describing crimes that elicit strong or weak disgust matched on punishment severity using the US Federal Sentencing Guidelines. An extraneous sentence at the end of each vignette described the perpetrator's personality using traits or biological language, mimicking the increased use of scientific evidence presented in courts. Behavioral results indicate that crimes weak in disgust receive significantly less punishment than the guidelines recommend. Neuroimaging results indicate that brain regions active during logical reasoning respond less to crimes weak in disgust and biological descriptions of personality, demonstrating the impact of emotion and social cognition on logical reasoning mechanisms necessary for legal decision-making.

An fMRI investigation of the effects of belief in free will on third-party punishment

The relationship between belief in free will (BFW) and third-party punishment (TPP) of criminal norm violations has been the subject of great debate among philosophers, criminologists and neuroscientists. We combined a TPP task with functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate how lay people's BFW might affect their punishment of hypothetical criminal offenses varying in affective content. Our results revealed that people with strong BFW punished more harshly than people with weak BFW, but only in low affective cases, likely driven by a more robust commitment to moral responsibility. This effect was mirrored by a stronger activation in the right temporo-parietal junction, a region presumably involved in attentional selection to salient stimuli and attribution of temporary intentions and beliefs of others. But, for high affective cases, the BFW-based behavioral and neural differences disappeared. Both groups similarly punished high affective cases and showed higher activation in the right insula. The right insula is typically activated during aversive interoceptive-emotional processing for extreme norm violations. Our results demonstrated that the impact of BFW on TPP is context-dependent; perhaps explaining in part why the philosophical debate between free will and determinism is so stubbornly persistent.

The importance of moral construal: moral versus non-moral construal elicits faster, more extreme, universal evaluations of the same actions

Over the past decade, intuitionist models of morality have challenged the view that moral reasoning is the sole or even primary means by which moral judgments are made. Rather, intuitionist models posit that certain situations automatically elicit moral intuitions, which guide moral judgments. We present three experiments showing that evaluations are also susceptible to the influence of moral versus non-moral construal. We had participants make moral evaluations (rating whether actions were morally good or bad) or non-moral evaluations (rating whether actions were pragmatically or hedonically good or bad) of a wide variety of actions. As predicted, moral evaluations were faster, more extreme, and more strongly associated with universal prescriptions-the belief that absolutely nobody or everybody should engage in an action-than non-moral (pragmatic or hedonic) evaluations of the same actions. Further, we show that people are capable of flexibly shifting from moral to non-moral evaluations on a trial-by-trial basis. Taken together, these experiments provide evidence that moral versus non-moral construal has an important influence on evaluation and suggests that effects of construal are highly flexible. We discuss the implications of these experiments for models of moral judgment and decision-making.

Neural correlates of moral reasoning in autism spectrum disorder

In our study, we tried to clarify whether patients with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) reveal different moral decision patterns as compared to healthy subjects and whether common social interaction difficulties in ASD are reflected in altered brain activation during different aspects of moral reasoning. 28 patients with high-functioning ASD and 28 healthy subjects matched for gender, age and education took part in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Participants were confronted with textual dilemma situations followed by proposed solutions to which they could agree or disagree. On a neural level, moral decision making was associated with activation in anterior medial prefrontal regions, the temporo-parietal junction and the precuneus for both groups. However, while patients and healthy controls did not exhibit significant behavioral differences, ASD patients showed decreased activation in limbic regions, particularly the amygdala, as well as increased activation in the anterior and the posterior cingulate gyrus during moral reasoning. Alterations of brain activation in patients might thus indicate specific impairments in empathy. However, activation increases in brain regions associated with the 'default mode network' and self-referential cognition also provide evidence for an altered way of patients' cerebral processing with regard to decision making based on social information.

Distinction between Externally vs. Internally Guided Decision-Making: Operational Differences, Meta-Analytical Comparisons and Their Theoretical Implications

Most experimental studies of decision-making have specifically examined situations in which a single less-predictable correct answer exists (externally guided decision-making under uncertainty). Along with such externally guided decision-making, there are instances of decision-making in which no correct answer based on external circumstances is available for the subject (internally guided decision-making). Such decisions are usually made in the context of moral decision-making as well as in preference judgment, where the answer depends on the subject's own, i.e., internal, preferences rather than on external, i.e., circumstantial, criteria. The neuronal and psychological mechanisms that allow guidance of decisions based on more internally oriented criteria in the absence of external ones remain unclear. This study was undertaken to compare decision-making of these two kinds empirically and theoretically. First, we reviewed studies of decision-making to clarify experimental-operational differences between externally guided and internally guided decision-making. Second, using multi-level kernel density analysis, a whole-brain-based quantitative meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies was performed. Our meta-analysis revealed that the neural network used predominantly for internally guided decision-making differs from that for externally guided decision-making under uncertainty. This result suggests that studying only externally guided decision-making under uncertainty is insufficient to account for decision-making processes in the brain. Finally, based on the review and results of the meta-analysis, we discuss the differences and relations between decision-making of these two types in terms of their operational, neuronal, and theoretical characteristics.

Brains in context in the neurolaw debate: the examples of free will and "dangerous" brains

Will neuroscience revolutionize forensic practice and our legal institutions? In the debate about the legal implications of brain research, free will and the neural bases of antisocial or criminal behavior are of central importance. By analyzing frequently quoted examples for the unconscious determinants of behavior and antisocial personality changes caused by brain lesions in a wider psychological and social context, the paper argues for a cautious middle position: Evidence for an impending normative "neuro-revolution" is scarce and neuroscience may instead gradually improve legal practice in the long run, particularly where normative questions directly pertain to brain-related questions. In the conclusion the paper raises concerns that applying neuroscience methods about an individual's responsibility or dangerousness is premature at the present time and carries serious individual and societal risks. Putting findings from brain research in wider contexts renders them empirically investigable in a way that does not neglect psychological and social aspects of human mind and behavior.

Neurolaw: Differential brain activity for black and white faces predicts damage awards in hypothetical employment discrimination cases

Currently, potential jurors' racial biases are measured by explicit questioning--a poor measure because people often hide their views to adhere to social norms, and people have implicit views they are not consciously aware of. In this experiment, we investigated whether two alternative methods of measuring racial bias--a standard black/white, good/bad implicit association test (IAT) and neural activity, measured by fMRI, in response to seeing faces of black and white individuals--could predict how much money subjects would award Black victims in hypothetical employment discrimination cases. IAT scores failed to predict how much money subjects awarded victims. However, in right inferior parietal lobule (BA 40) and in right superior/middle frontal gyrus (BA 9/10)--which have both previously been implicated in measuring biases and implicit preferences--the difference in neural activity between when subjects viewed black faces paired with neutral adjectives and when subjects viewed white faces paired with neutral adjectives was positively correlated with the amount of money the subjects awarded victims. This suggests that brain activity measures racial bias with more practical validity, at least in this situation and with our sample size, than a common behavioral measure (the IAT).