Sunday, October 7, 2007 | Science : Psychiatry and Psychology | print version

Be Good Now, Or Else

by Steve Mitchell

Reposted from:
http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/1003/3?etoc

Neuroscientists have taken a step closer to a physiological explanation of why some people work and play well with others. Two areas in the brain appear to have key roles in how people conform with social norms. These parts of the brain mature slowly, which may help explain why adolescents are less easily cowed by the threat of punishment than are adults.

All societies have social norms or widely shared beliefs about how people should behave in a given situation. But little is known about how the brain processes the possibility of punishment for violating these norms. To gain insight into this phenomena, a team led by Manfred Spitzer of the University of Ulm in Germany used a technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging to determine which areas in the brain were most active in 23 men making decisions that could result in social punishment.

The men were given money and asked to decide how much of it to share with someone else. The men knew that the other person could punish them by reducing some or all of their money if they decided the initial shared amount was unfair. Several areas of the men's brains were active, but the regions that seemed to be the most involved in how the men made their decisions included the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the researchers report in the 4 October issue of Neuron. These areas, which reside near the front of the brain, have previously been associated with social moral judgments.

The brain regions showed less activity when a computer was meting out the punishment, indicating the prospect of disappointing or angering the other person may be more important than the fear of the punishment itself in activating these areas. "It's very convincing," says Daniel Hommer, a neuroscientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

The findings could have implications for how children are handled by the criminal justice system because the identified brain regions do not fully develop until adulthood, Spitzer says. "This implies that the threat of punishment may not work in these younger people as it supposedly does in people with fully matured brains," he says. "It appears to be a bit like punishing the blind for not seeing." The results also could lead to a better understanding of psychopathic behavior. Spitzer plans to study prison inmates with various types and degrees of personality disorders to find out if they have less activation in these brain regions in response to potential punishments.

Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis, says the study suggests it may one day be possible to predict how a particular person might behave by scanning his or her brain. "We may not be able to pull out individuals now," Raichle says, "but the mere suggestion that you might be able to do that is important."

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1. Comment #76835 by Nails on October 7, 2007 at 12:28 pm

Very interesting.
Certainly strenthens the view that we don't get our morals from god.
Certainly we don't get our morals from the bible.

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2. Comment #76839 by Northern Bright on October 7, 2007 at 12:48 pm

the study suggests it may one day be possible to predict how a particular person might behave by scanning his or her brain. "We may not be able to pull out individuals now," Raichle says, "but the mere suggestion that you might be able to do that is important."

I'm not sure I've understood what Raichle is suggesting by "pull out" here. Is it just me, or does it - in the context - sound vaguely sinister?

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3. Comment #76844 by Veronique on October 7, 2007 at 1:06 pm

2. Comment #76839 by Northern Bright

When you consider the title of the article, Raichle's quote could certainly be construed as sinister - you know, pulled out for neuroscientific 'treatment'.

Though, I am sure the quote has been taken out of context. Well, I hope so anyway.

Cheers
V

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4. Comment #76846 by briancoughlanworldcitizen on October 7, 2007 at 1:11 pm

Certainly we don't get our morals from the bible.

The more we know, the less meaningful the idea of punishment becomes. Looks like the namby, pamby liberals have been right all along.

In fact an all knowing God, fully briefed on every impulse, every neuron, every event pushing a person in direction X instead of Y, is the very entity that should eschew the concept of punishment altogether. Another nail in the coffin, keep 'em coming.

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5. Comment #76847 by briancoughlanworldcitizen on October 7, 2007 at 1:14 pm

2. Comment #76839 by Northern Bright on October 7, 2007 at 12:48 pm
avatar

I'm not sure I've understood what Raichle is suggesting by "pull out" here. Is it just me, or does it - in the context - sound vaguely sinister?

I took it to mean "identify". In the sense there is little value in punishing someone who is blind for not seeing (as the article notes), there is also little benefit in processing someone through a criminal justice system that will do nothing to help them or deter them from further offences. Tricky stuff this knowledge ....

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6. Comment #76850 by Northern Bright on October 7, 2007 at 1:22 pm

I took it to mean "identify".

Yes, so did I, BCWC ... but to what end? What should society do with a potential criminal (or whatever) who has not yet committed any wrongdoing? I'm not normally someone who sees threats to civil liberties around every corner, but I confess to feeling a little twitchy about this. IF I've understood Raichle's comment correctly, of course.

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7. Comment #76852 by Nick Good on October 7, 2007 at 1:30 pm

The brain regions showed less activity when a computer was meting out the punishment, indicating the prospect of disappointing or angering the other person may be more important than the fear of the punishment itself in activating these areas.

I think it depends how you're 'wired' and how your socialised. Certainly I can assert that this would hold true with me.

Personally, I play on my personal intuitive knowledge of this in how I bring up my 10 year old son, who thinks very similarly to me.

I reason with him about cause and effect all the time. I 'exploit' his innate capacity for reason, empathy and compassion and his personal judgment about what is seemly and wholesome.... his internal moral compass if you will. I use this far more than stick and carrot. Though I do use reward....but again, at a level removed. I try not to punt it as a carrot. He's getting a nice new mountain bike for Christmas, and he has done well in his school exams. I pointedly did not explicitly link the two.

I'm trying to bring up a rounded human being; not one of Pavlov's dogs!

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8. Comment #76854 by briancoughlanworldcitizen on October 7, 2007 at 1:34 pm

Yes, so did I, BCWC ... but to what end? What should society do with a potential criminal (or whatever) who has not yet committed any wrongdoing? I'm not normally someone who sees threats to civil liberties around every corner, but I confess to feeling a little twitchy about this. IF I've understood Raichle's comment correctly, of course.

Ah ... no, I didn't see it in a "Minority Report" sense, where the "criminal" is arrested prior to the crime. I would imagine this used post crime to identify optimal .... treatments?

Some crimes are entirely rational, don't have enough to eat, anywhere to live etc. Some are an uncontrollable compulsion. There is a whole continuum in between, and each type of underlying cause of crime, would benefit from tailored treatment. I guess. The more knowledge you can bring to bear on the subject the better.

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9. Comment #76856 by Dr Benway on October 7, 2007 at 1:40 pm

Stuff isn't always as local in the brain as these popular articles might imply. For example, that bit that makes you good helps you do a lot of other things.

In any event, morality is an onion of many layers. Relationships are so important for human survival that several complimentary systems have evolved to support pro-social behavior.

- "Be good or else" is a basic layer.
- Utilitarian reasoning, which requires some ability to weigh probable outcomes, is a layer.
- Feelings of pride or shame before one's imagined social group is a layer.
- Empathy is a layer.
- Application of the "reasonable person in this situation" rule is a layer.
- Abstract, language based ethical reasoning is a layer.

So long as we have children, criminals, and people like wee flea, we will need "be good or else" or "try that again asshole and you're dead."

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10. Comment #76858 by Bonzai on October 7, 2007 at 1:41 pm

It is good that neuroscience is getting more breakthroughs.

But I suggest we shouldn't get too carried away. Any use of such knowledge should proceed in extreme caution. I can see social engineers of all stripes may want to exploit this knowledge in a Brave New World-ish way.

Knowledge is a double edged sword. It is a key that can open the gate of heaven as well as the doorway to hell (forgive my religious reference)It depends on the purpose and wisdom (or lack of it)of those who have control over the knowledge.

Knowledge of how the brain functions can be and likely would be used for social control to undermine freedom since we do live in a class society where power is very unevenly distributed. Technology is often deployed as a weapon against those without power and as a way to consolidate existing ignorance and prejudice.For example in some countries parents use ultrasound scans to select the gender of babies. If we know how "gay brains" are wired differently and can perform the relevant brain scans on a developing fetus, I am sure many prospective parents would want to abort "gay fetus" and there is a good financial incentive for doctors who would provide the service. In the extreme cases, say in totalitarian countries, neuroscience may be used to "prove" that freedom is a mere delusion.

Finally, for everything we know about the brain there is a lot more that we don't and what we know seems to be subjected to rather rapid revisions. It would be socially irresponsible to try to turn this very tentative and incomplete understanding into policy and technology which may have irreversible impacts on people's lives. I agree with Northern Bright that the last bit of that article does sound sinister.

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11. Comment #76859 by Bonzai on October 7, 2007 at 1:52 pm

Ah ... no, I didn't see it in a "Minority Report" sense, where the "criminal" is arrested prior to the crime. I would imagine this used post crime to identify optimal .... treatments?

Or to deny people jobs, housing etc. Well I heard that people actually get fired in the U.S because DNA tests identify that they may be more prone to certain diseases because the company pays for health insurances. In the U.K I heard people are denied health coverage on the ground of DNA test.

If these kinds of "identifying" info are available I am concerned how they would be used. Experience proves that it is rarely used in a way that is limited to finding "optimal treatments" when things do go wrong especially when the information supposedly can identify "criminal tendencies"

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12. Comment #76860 by Northern Bright on October 7, 2007 at 1:52 pm

OK, I see what you're suggesting now! I wonder if societies could cope with such a tailored response to criminal tendencies though. There would presumably have to be some effective treatment available for such people before this approach could be beneficial to society (as opposed to the individual offender).

But would that throw up ethical concerns too? Let's say it were possible to "re-program" an offender's brain to reduce the likelihood of re-offending. I can see the argument in favour, from a purely utilitarian point of view. But could it be argued that this would be interfering with their personality in some way and would therefore constitute an infringement of their human rights?

Fascinating as the insight is into how the brain affects conformity to social norms, it just seems to me that any application of this new knowledge has the potential to be ethically fraught. I hate to sound like a Daily Mail reader (I'm not!!) but "thin ends" and "wedges" spring to mind!

(Actually, on reflection, your average Daily Mail reader would probably approve of re-programming criminals' minds. As long as you could still hang' em and flog 'em too, of course.)

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13. Comment #76867 by Nick Good on October 7, 2007 at 2:01 pm

Northern Bright wrote: (Actually, on reflection, your average Daily Mail reader would probably approve of re-programming criminals' minds. As long as you could still hang' em and flog 'em too, of course.)

Personally; I am not entirely convinced that the average Daily Mail reader, whatever that construes, is any more morally compromised than the average BBC Question Time watcher or Guardian reader. But I'm open to persuasion, in either direction.

And please; let's hope no logically challenged folks misconstrue this as any kind of endorsement of the Daily Mail!

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14. Comment #76869 by briancoughlanworldcitizen on October 7, 2007 at 2:04 pm

But would that throw up ethical concerns too? Let's say it were possible to "re-program" an offender's brain to reduce the likelihood of re-offending. I can see the argument in favour, from a purely utilitarian point of view. But could it be argued that this would be interfering with their personality in some way and would therefore constitute an infringement of their human rights?

Well this is course the very relativistic business that has the more educated theists so exercised. Who decides what human rights even are?

The simple answer is we collectively make this stuff up as we go along, so in a very real sense, there is no right and wrong. Eeeek!!!

Of course this is rot, there is a baseline morality, and it's becoming increasingly clear it's embedded into our genes. It expresses itself most clearly in the golden rule, but is of course plenty fuzzy as we get down to specifics.

This kind of technology, and plenty of others (heard of crowd dispersal by intense pain?) are going to give ethicists plenty to talk about in the future.

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15. Comment #76873 by Bonzai on October 7, 2007 at 2:18 pm

briancoughlanworldcitizen ,

The simple answer is we collectively make this stuff up as we go along, so in a very real sense, there is no right and wrong. Eeeek!!!

Of course this is rot, there is a baseline morality, and it's becoming increasingly clear it's embedded into our genes. It expresses itself most clearly in the golden rule, but is of course plenty fuzzy as we get down to specifics.

Three points.

1) In many cases (even most cases) we don't collectively decide how technology is going to be deployed. People with power do. See my examples on DNA tests.

2) Majority rule is not a proper safeguard against abuse of the minority. There are plenty of examples where the majority gladly go along when technology is used in a way that targets the weak, powerless segments of the society, for example eugenics. If there is a way to identify homosexuals through brain scans, I won't be confidently counting on the wisdom of "collective decisions" on how this information would be used if I am gay.

3)You don't have to be a theist to see that ethics is a complicated problem and simplistic slogans like "good or bad doesn't exist" or "we trust the collective wisdom of the people because ethics is hard wired into us" are of little help in actually formulating policies.

Moral concerns and empathy may be hardwired, but we also have the capacity to over-ride them when it suits our purposes. Otherwise there would be no explanation for all the inhumanities that we inflict on our fellow human beings since the dawn of history.

Also in many cases the moral consequences of complex and "abstract" decisions are so far removed from our immediate perceptions that our "gut instincts" don't kick in, so hardwiring of morality is quite irrelevant in actual, complex ethical discourse. Hard wiring may be an adequate explanatory paradigm for the origin of the moral instinct but it doesn't help in operationally teasing out the moral consequences of complex decisions in an actual, specific context(we agree on this)

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16. Comment #76874 by Northern Bright on October 7, 2007 at 2:19 pm

Well this is course the very relativistic business that has the more educated theists so exercised. Who decides what human rights even are?

Well, since the God of the Bible would have condemned our hypothetical criminal to hell on the basis of actions performed under the influence of faulty hardware/software designed and provided by God himself, I think we can safely leave him out of the moral equation, don't you?!

This kind of technology, and plenty of others (heard of crowd dispersal by intense pain?) are going to give ethicists plenty to talk about in the future.

I agree - and I think the ending of the article would have sounded less sinister if it had acknowledged as much.

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17. Comment #76936 by the izz on October 7, 2007 at 9:59 pm

This seems like an interesting avenue of research, but with a sample size of only 23, and including only men, it hardly seems conclusive.

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18. Comment #77025 by Vendetta on October 8, 2007 at 8:10 am

Well this is a fascinating article and I agree with NB that it's not hard to see this in a sinister light. The term slippery slope comes to mind.

Oh and BCWC, your avatar always makes me laugh. Horn of Gondor indeed.

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19. Comment #77046 by Ultraviolet G on October 8, 2007 at 9:33 am

Corporate abuse of DNA testing is a big concern in many areas.

The concept of health insurance is that it's like a big club, and it works financially and socially if everyone accepts "I don't know if I will get ill, but just in case, I will pay some money, and we will all share the risk". This is pretty efficient, because there are enough of us to smooth out the costs and benefits, and basically quite nice because it takes care of the occasional unlucky person.

Recently, companies are trying hard to "screen out" risky customers, or charge them more, while still offering "shared risk" style insurance to the less risky customers.

So..In the future, the only people being offered the insurance will be the ones who aren't at risk!???

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20. Comment #79869 by hakija on October 18, 2007 at 9:26 pm

Science continues to chip away at the myth of "god given" morality. This breakthrough could help addicts and criminally minded learn alternative behavior and help develop better early child environs and education strategies. I just hope in a country that has little public support for sci research like the US, we can find testable applications which prove its usefulness. The superstitious among us will poo poo it as usual.

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21. Comment #79871 by Bonzai on October 18, 2007 at 9:46 pm

Comment #79869 by hakija,

This breakthrough could help addicts and criminally minded learn alternative behavior and help develop better early child environs and education strategies.

It could, but chances are it wouldn't. If they work, behaviour modification techniques would be much more likely be used as a means for social control in our kind of society. It is very naive to think that science will always be put into humane use especially in view of Comment #77046 by Ultraviolet G right above yours. The application of science is a political issue, it is not a scientific one.

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22. Comment #79960 by Anlao on October 19, 2007 at 9:06 am

The article does present validation question-marks, as well as limited-linear reasoning. Glad to see people that don't get carried away and look at a larger spectrum of factors that determine the human mind and behavior. (brain development, culture, upbringing, existence of more or less traumatic experiences in life).

As for the "pulling individuals out" reference, I do not find it sinister at all, just highly unpractical. Being able to map out a person's brain can be theoretically useful, in determining which centers are overly or under developed, and understanding how (or even if) these centers correlate with a persons displayed behavior. This can be useful in therapeutic interventions, theoretically it's almost like you would have an "user manual" for each person ("aha, if I try your affective center you will not respond, but if I stimulate your reasoning you will be engaged and you'll activate the affective one") I'm talking as a theoretic model only, practically there are more questions raised than answers provided and a lot of ethical issues. Some of them that I can think of:
- what happens when some of these neural centers are correlated with the memory or affective centers? If you use the same pattern you re-validate a negative reasoning, if you brake the pattern, how do you know you're creating a better one?
- If a person has an un-developed center (eg. moral,or affective) the plausible way to stimulate it is trough access it trough the strong developed centers, thus re-enforcing the existing thinking patterns, either positively or negatively, even though you obtain signs of successful usage of the under-developed center. So it would not be a true re-habilitation, just a more elevated pavlovian model.
- What would be the ultimate purpose? As much as science evolves, in terms of behavior change some principles still remain valid as they were hundreds of years ago: in order for a true behavior change to happen, the person must desire that change. Pushing hot buttons on an individual that does not want to improve / change will only make them more innovative in perpetuating their desired behavior (either in hiding it, flaunting it in rebellion, or searching reasons to make it "justifiable").
- The flawed assumption that a person does not change. People evolve, some aspects improve, others degenerate, so it is not advisable to assume the same "button" will trigger the same response every single time. We're re-writing ourselves every time we try something new.
- All the issues of human identity and uniqueness that arise from altering a human being for the purpose of "perfection" or "averaging to normal".
- What about unbelievable minds? Should be "improve" the next Mozart? Einstein had the corpus callosum (the bridge between brain hemispheres) of a woman, which was an anomaly for the physiognomy of a man. Should we abort the future Einsteins because of gay-paranoia?
See Einstein brain article below:
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-brainsex16jun16,0,5806592,full.story

As much as I am fascinated by psychology and I understand the benefits of neuro-psychology, in terms of positive behavior change I still believe that it cannot overcome the power of basic human interaction. "Hi, how are you? What do you think of…?"

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