Vanderbilt University News
Crime and punishment: the neurobiological roots of modern justice
by David Salisbury | Posted on Wednesday, Apr. 18, 2012 The willingness of people to punish others who lie, cheat, steal or violate other socialnorms even when they weren't harmed and don't stand to benefit personally, is a distinctly Groundbreaking legal research shows potentially serious failures in the Model Penal Code
by Amy Wolf | Posted on Thursday, Dec. 1, 2011 Results cast doubt on assumptions about juror abilities, particularly in homicide casesGroundbreaking new legal research from a team of Vanderbilt University and other researchers suggests that juror confusion over how to apply the Model Penal Code in criminal trials could cause major, unnoticed and life-altering sentencing errors. |
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The paradox of moral focus.
Young L, Phillips J. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Cognition. 2011 May;119(2):166-78. When we evaluate moral agents, we consider many factors, including whether the agent acted freely, or under duress or coercion. In turn, moral evaluations have been shown to influence our (non-moral) evaluations of these same factors. For example, when we judge an agent to have acted immorally, we are subsequently more likely to judge the agent to have acted freely, not under force. Here, we investigate the cognitive signatures of this effect in interpersonal situations, in which one agent ("forcer") forces another agent ("forcee") to act either immorally or morally. The structure of this relationship allowed us to ask questions about both the "forcer" and the "forcee." Paradoxically, participants judged that the "forcer" forced the "forcee" to act immorally (i.e. X forced Y), but that the "forcee" was not forced to act immorally (i.e. Y was not forced by X). This pattern obtained only for human agents who acted intentionally. Directly changing participants' focus from one agent to another (forcer versus forcee) also changed the target of moral evaluation and therefore force attributions. The full pattern of judgments may provide a window into motivated moral reasoning and focusing bias more generally; participants may have been motivated to attribute greater force to the immoral forcer and greater freedom to the immoral forcee. |