Please join us for the final Krasnow Monday Seminar of the semester
on 12/3/12.
Refreshments will be served at 3:30pm. Come chat with colleagues
and like-minded researchers and students prior to the talk at 4pm.
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TITLE:
Third-Party Punishment of Social Norm Violations: An fMRI
investigation
SPEAKER:
Frank Krueger
Molecular Neuroscience/Psychology
Krasnow Institute
George Mason University
DATE: Monday, December 3, 2012
TIME: 4:00 p.m.
LOCATION: Lecture Room (Room 229)
Krasnow Institute Building
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
ABSTRACT:
Third-party punishment as a means of enforcing cooperation in
response to social norm violations is probably a unique human
evolved behavior, which was selected since it enabled large-scale
and long-term cooperation among genetically unrelated individuals by
deferring cheating and free-riding. In particular, large-scale human
societies expect that criminal behavior will be punished, usually by
impartial third-party decision-makers (i.e. state-empowered
enforcers such as jurors and judges), who will assess moral
responsibility and determine the appropriate legal punishment.
Exploring how the human brain governs our response to norm
violations in criminal contexts can lead to advanced knowledge for
lawmakers in understanding juror’s decision making in trials and to
more effective criminal sentencing. However, remarkably little is
known about the psychological and neural components of legal
third-party punishment. By combining functional MRI with a
third-party punishment task, healthy participants (lay jurors) were
asked to estimate how much punishment a hypothetical offender
deserved for a set of prototypical offenses ranging across harm from
property destruction and theft to rape and murder. The results
revealed a neural third-party punishment network relying upon
specific psychological components each modulated by a distinct
cortical midline structure drawing on elementary and domain-general
computations: norm violation of the offense (dorsomedial prefrontal
cortex, dmPFC), harm to the victim (posterior cingulate), and
benefit for the offender (ventromedial prefrontal cortex, vmPFC).
Applying multivariate Granger causality mapping, a reciprocally
connected dmPFC-vmPFC circuit was identified as the driver of the
third-party punishment network, serving as a convergence zone
linking information across regions to determine the appropriate
degree of punishment for illegal behavior. The identified components
of third-party punishment confirm the criminal law’s central
underpinnings of punishment: it depends first on the detection of a
norm violation and then on an assessment of the costs and benefits
of the violation (i.e. the harm to the victim and the benefits to
the offender). The novel findings help to address future questions
about law and policy that have been difficult to resolve based on
traditional models of academic and folk psychology.
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For additional directions or information call 703-993-4333 or browse
to
http://krasnow.gmu.edu/location/ .
The full semester seminar schedule is at
http://krasnow.gmu.edu/blog/category/monday-seminars/upcomingmondayseminars/
.