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The Neuroscience of Blame and Punishment

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Self, Culture and Consciousness

Abstract

In the last five years, a great deal has been learned about how human brains address the social problem of punishing wrongdoers. Although it is far too early to be confident that these insights will shed any practical light on criminal law or procedure, patterns are emerging that suggest a framework that someday could have significant legal and social consequences. In this chapter, we first survey the behavioural and theoretical evidence supporting the proposition that the willingness to blame then punish norm-violators is an evolved human trait. Then we sample the recent neuroscience literature on normative punishment, and follow that with a presentation of our neuropsychological model of blame and third-party punishment. We finish with a discussion of the potential implications a confirmed model might have for law and policy.

This chapter is adapted from our paper, Krueger, F. and Hoffman, M. (2016) The emerging neuroscience of third-party punishment, Trends in Neuroscience, 39(8): 499–501, and from Hoffman, M. 2014. The Punisher’s Brain: The Evolution of Judge and Jury (Cambridge University Press).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The most famous was Lorenz and Wilson  (2002), who wrote a whole book about it.

  2. 2.

    Many behavioural studies have confirmed that several primate species, and even some non-primate mammals, have a kind of empathy. To the extent that mirror neurons are involved with empathy, these behavioural results converge with experiments showing many of these same empathising social animals have mirror neurons. Indeed, some theorists have speculated that the essential imitative function of what we call mirror neurons may be a widespread neuronal phenomenon across many species.

  3. 3.

    Hume (1968) made this argument—that the roots of morality lie in our ability to socialise our own desires, i.e. have empathy—200 years ago.

  4. 4.

    A well-recognised statistical measure of the agreement between lists of rankings is called Kendall’s W (K w ), which measures not just differences in the rankings but also the degree of those differences. A K w of 1 means the lists match perfectly. A K w of 0 means no more matching than would expected of random ranking. A K w of 0.5 is typically described as ‘moderate agreement’. Subjects in the Robinson and Darley blameworthiness experiments averaged a K w ranging from 0.88 to 0.95. The only experimental behavioural tasks that even remotely approach this level of almost total agreement are things like asking visually unimpaired subjects to rate the brightness of objects (K w  = 0.95) and asking subjects to rate faces by how much pain they are feeling (K w  = 0.97).

  5. 5.

    Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) uses electromagnetic energy, focused into a small diameter, to temporarily disrupt the electrical impulses of neurons in regions of the brain fairly close to the surface.

  6. 6.

    A first model was published by Buckholtz and Marois (2012).

  7. 7.

    Note 5 supra.

  8. 8.

    Whether neuroscience will ever change our folk-psychological notions about things like personhood and responsibility—and, more radically, whether it might even disprove some of those notions—is the subject of considerable debate. Compare Greene and Cohen 2004 (‘[W]hen the mechanical nature of human decision-making is fully appreciated… the idea of distinguishing the truly, deeply guilty from those who are merely victims of neuronal circumstance will, we submit, seem pointless.’) with Morse (2015) (‘At present, neuroscience has little to contribute to more just and accurate criminal law policy, doctrine and individual case adjudication [and] no radical transformation of criminal justice is likely to occur….’). We discuss in the balance of this section the possibility that the neuroscience of punishment may someday lead to less dramatic, but no less important, changes in the law.

  9. 9.

    132 S. Ct. 2455 (2012).

  10. 10.

    Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2008).

  11. 11.

    Montgomery v. Louisiana, 136 S. Ct. 718 (2016).

  12. 12.

    Hoffman, supra note 30, at 334–47.

  13. 13.

    Remember, though, that this data showing that different judges impose wildly different sentences on similar defendants in similar cases is not at all inconsistent with the remarkable uniformity with which humans blame. Note 5 supra.

  14. 14.

    In a follow-up study, researchers were able to improve results, but only marginally, by changing the definitions of these two problematic mental states (Ginther et al. 2014).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Denver, Denver, CO, USA

    Morris B. Hoffman

  2. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Frank Krueger

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  1. Morris B. Hoffman
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  2. Frank Krueger
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Correspondence to Frank Krueger .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. NIAS Consciousness Studies Programme, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

    Sangeetha Menon

  2. NIAS Consciousness Studies Programme, National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

    Nithin Nagaraj

  3. National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

    V. V. Binoy

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Hoffman, M.B., Krueger, F. (2017). The Neuroscience of Blame and Punishment. In: Menon, S., Nagaraj, N., Binoy, V. (eds) Self, Culture and Consciousness. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5777-9_13

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