In the brain, justice is served from many parts
Imaging study reveals variation in brain activity depending on the severity of punishment a person decides
Making decisions about crime and punishment is, it turns out, as complicated as a legal brief. For the first time, scientists have peered into the brains of people who are deciding whether a crime deserves punishment and how severe the penalty should be.
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Those decisions involve parts of the brain associated with rational thought, but emotion-processing regions weigh in too, a team of law and neuroscience researchers from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., show in a new study in the Dec. 11 Neuron. The findings suggest that brain areas active in deciding a harsh punishment for a crime deliberately committed are different than those active when giving the accused some benefit of the doubt.
“We’ve identified regions that are jointly involved, but separately deployed to make a legal decision,” says Owen Jones, a professor of law and biology at Vanderbilt who led the study with neuroscientist René Marois.