Science Imitates Art?
Tell me which of these three cool studies reminds you of Minority Report.
Study 1: Psychologist Nathan Spreng and fellow researchers described fictitious individuals with either agreeable or extroverted characteristics to a group of subjects then asked the subjects, while scanning their brains, to imagine how each individual would behave in certain situations. The researchers found they could accurately infer which fictitious individual a subject was imagining based only on activity in the subject’s medial prefrontal cortex.
Study 2: Psychiatrist Drew Barzman and his research team collected saliva samples from 7- to 9-year-old boys shortly after they were admitted to a hospital for psychiatric care. Their goal was to identify which children were most likely to be aggressive and violent, a pervasive problem for psychiatric health care providers. Their results showed that the severity and frequency of the boys’ aggression was associated with their levels of the hormones testosterone, DHEA, and cortisol.
Study 3: Neuroscientist Eyal Aharoni and colleagues conducted brain scans of 96 male prisoners immediately before their release from prison. They found the prisoners with low ACC activity during a quick-decision task were rearrested for all crimes at a rate 2.6 times greater than those with high activity in the same region and rearrested for non-violent crimes at a rate 4.3 times greater than their high-activity counterparts.Â
Wow! But Proceed with Caution?
I don’t know about you, but they all remind me in one way or another of Minority Report. But is scientific foreknowledge of people’s bad behavior a good thing? Used properly, it can be. For instance, the authors of Study 2 (saliva tests) say such knowledge could help doctors put together more effective medical treatment plans for violence-prone patients. But here are five reasons, two scientific and three social, to be careful with this science.
Reason 1: Sometimes these studies don’t follow the classic scientific model, which dictates that researchers should use theory to make predictions (hypotheses) they later test by collecting data that either confirm their predictions or not. This process reduces false positives that result from random associations occurring only in a specific set of data and nowhere else. Neuroimaging studies, for instance, sometimes reverse the process by searching first through the vast data collected by brain scans for activity patterns in brain regions, which they then use to create an explanation (theory) that is scientifically suspect because of its convenience and likely higher levels of unreliability.
Reason 2: The biomarker (e.g., hormone or brain region) under study may not represent the scientific explanation of a behavior a researcher thinks it represents. For example, the researchers in my post “Why Politics Makes Your Head Hurtâ€Â go out of their way, correctly, to say that although they believe the brain region associated with liberals relates to social and self-awareness and the region associated with conservatives relates to the body’s fear-based fight-or-flight system, the regions could be related to something completely different such as reward or emotion processing. Â
Reason 3: The 1st Amendment to the US Constitution guarantees individuals a right to free speech that is extended to a right to free thought. A person is free to say, and think, whatever s/he likes, but the right is not absolute. We all remember from high school civics class US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous claim that a person cannot yell “fire†in a crowded movie theater. People’s free speech rights are also limited, for example, by prohibitions against the possession of child pornography and the use of “fighting words.†That is, you can say what you want as long as it doesn’t immediately endanger the safety of people around you. Is it a far stretch, then, to say someone’s brain activity indicates they are a danger to the people around them and, therefore, they must be limited or incapacitated to protect those people?
Reason 4: Just like racial profiling, “neuro-†or “hormonal†profiling lacks the power, at this point, to separate the good guys from the bad guys. While many of the terrorist events we hear about in the news are instigated by Muslims, clearly an infinitesimally small proportion of Muslims are terrorists. Likewise, just because an individual has a certain biological profile does not mean that s/he will behave in the ways associated with that profile. Is it a far stretch, then, to say that some people in today’s violent world may be willing to give up their or others’ privacy of thought in exchange for greater protection from criminals by the government?
Reason 5: Our criminal system is based on intent. In essence, to be guilty of a crime you have to intend to commit that crime (my apologies to my lawyer friends, who I’m sure cringe at my lay interpretation of one of their core principles). Can a person who is born with an underdeveloped frontal lobe or deformed amygdala, both of which have been associated with extreme antisocial behavior, possess the free will necessary to “intend†to commit a crime? If the answer is no, is it a far stretch, then, that we start down a “slippery slopeâ€Â to a society in which no one has responsibility for their bad behavior?
I Have Foreknowledge
Regardless of the concerns, these studies are extremely interesting. And what I can predict is we’re going to see more studies like them as the technology used to conduct them continues to advance. The results will be controversial, and the ensuing debates will be almost as much fun to watch as a good Tom Cruise movie…almost.
Is the seemingly impossible future science of Minority Report a worry for today? I hope you’ll leave a comment and let me know what you think.
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For more information on the research discussed above…
Aharoni et al. 2013. “Neuroprediction of future rearrest.â€Â Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
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Tags:
aggression, biomarker, brain, bran scan, crime, crime prevention, criminal behavior, criminal intent, criminal investigation, criminal law, criminal profiling, law enforcement, minority report, neuroimaging, neuroscience, prediction, prison, racial profiling, recidivism, testosterone, tom cruise, violence
