Deciding whether or not someone is guilty of a crime is primarily a matter of logic, but emotion comes into play when we set the punishment. That’s the finding of a Vanderbilt University research project, published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Neuron.
In the study, participants sat in an MRI machine, reading short stories describing crimes, and acting as judge and jury. Time and time again, the scans showed that the questions of guilt and punishment are handled by separate portions of the brain. The question that remains is whether emotion is the reason for the choice of punishment, or if it’s a result of making that decision.
Researcher Owen Jones is a professor of law as well as behavioral biology.
Either way, he says the study sheds scientific light on an age-old legal question.
“There’s been debate at various times about the proper role of emotion and analytic reason in punishment decisions and what’s important about our study is it suggests that normal punishment decisions are the result of these two distinct neural systems that are jointly involved but separately deployed.”
The study is just the first of many around the nation funded by the McArthur Foundation in an attempt to understand how the brain handles issues of crime and punishment.
At Vanderbilt, plans are underway to repeat the experiment with psychopaths who’ve been convicted of a crime, in order to see if they process the decisions differently.
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