no physical duress confess to a crime she didn’t commit? Can the presentation of mug shots alter a witness’s memory of her attacker? Is it possible to predict the severity of someone’s sentence based on his appearance? Will we soon be able to tell whether a criminal will offend again by looking at a scan of his brain?
As we uncover the secret world of detectives, judges, prisoners, and others, we will confront challenging questions. What if our legal rules and practices not only are blind to the real influences on human behavior but serve to actively perpetuate myths that neuroscientists and psychologists have revealed to be false? What if the structures and frameworks of criminal law that we have adopted to eliminate bias actually make matters worse? And if most people are unfamiliar with the complexities of our hidden minds, might there be powerful players out there taking advantage of this knowledge to stack the cards in their favor at the expense of the weakest?
I was drawn to these issues in the early days of law school, as I began to realize that the way we understand the thinking and behavior of our legal actors is incorrect—and, frequently, harmful. The more I read and thought about things, the more convinced I became that we need a new model, grounded in the science of the mind, for our legal system to be truly just. In the last decade I’ve dedicated my professional life to exposing the flaws and pointing the way forward.
The supporting evidence in this book includes research I’ve conducted with other legal scholars and psychologists as well as studies I cover in my law school courses and outside lectures. Although the science is powerful, we need to handle it with care. Among other things, we need to remember that the laboratory can be different from the real world, that correlation is not causation, and that not all findings are equally established and robust.There is a danger when lawyers, judges, and policymakers start making changes to our legal system based on a flawed understanding of the relevant science or on unsubstantiated research.
But we also need to be conscious, right from the outset, of the immense cost of failing to consider potentially relevant scientific insights until they have reached the level of dogma. As we wait five or ten or fifty years for a finding to become incontrovertible, people’s lives are being upended by legal rules, principles, and norms that often have
no scientific basis at all
.
Many academics and journalists voiced grave misgivings when Judge Luisa Lo Gatto of Como, Italy, reduced the sentence of Stefania Albertani from life in prison to twenty years, based, in part, on structural images of her brain showing that two areas, the anterior cingulate gyrus and the insula, contained less gray matter than those of the average healthy woman.Stefania had pled guilty to murdering her sister, burning the corpse, and later trying to kill her parents.Critics of the reduced sentence made compelling arguments that the neuroscience linking deficiencies in these parts of the brain to reduced inhibition and increased aggression was far from fully developed and that it was a real leap to use it to explain a particular individual’s actions.Moreover, they noted, Stefania’s brain had been compared with the brains of just ten other women.
These are legitimate concerns. Yet few who sounded the alarm thought to question the basis of Stefania’s initial sentence.
It seems obvious that a person who chooses to force-feed her sister lethal quantities of psychotropic drugs before setting her on fire deserves severe punishment. But what research is there to demonstrate the underpinnings of that intuition—that “guilty minds,” evil, free will, and so on actually exist?Our thoughts, beliefs, and actions are simply the product of roughly 100 billion neurons, each with its associated synapses, sending out and receiving neurotransmitters.If some of these electrochemical reactions
As we uncover the secret world of detectives, judges, prisoners, and others, we will confront challenging questions. What if our legal rules and practices not only are blind to the real influences on human behavior but serve to actively perpetuate myths that neuroscientists and psychologists have revealed to be false? What if the structures and frameworks of criminal law that we have adopted to eliminate bias actually make matters worse? And if most people are unfamiliar with the complexities of our hidden minds, might there be powerful players out there taking advantage of this knowledge to stack the cards in their favor at the expense of the weakest?
I was drawn to these issues in the early days of law school, as I began to realize that the way we understand the thinking and behavior of our legal actors is incorrect—and, frequently, harmful. The more I read and thought about things, the more convinced I became that we need a new model, grounded in the science of the mind, for our legal system to be truly just. In the last decade I’ve dedicated my professional life to exposing the flaws and pointing the way forward.
The supporting evidence in this book includes research I’ve conducted with other legal scholars and psychologists as well as studies I cover in my law school courses and outside lectures. Although the science is powerful, we need to handle it with care. Among other things, we need to remember that the laboratory can be different from the real world, that correlation is not causation, and that not all findings are equally established and robust.There is a danger when lawyers, judges, and policymakers start making changes to our legal system based on a flawed understanding of the relevant science or on unsubstantiated research.
But we also need to be conscious, right from the outset, of the immense cost of failing to consider potentially relevant scientific insights until they have reached the level of dogma. As we wait five or ten or fifty years for a finding to become incontrovertible, people’s lives are being upended by legal rules, principles, and norms that often have
no scientific basis at all
.
Many academics and journalists voiced grave misgivings when Judge Luisa Lo Gatto of Como, Italy, reduced the sentence of Stefania Albertani from life in prison to twenty years, based, in part, on structural images of her brain showing that two areas, the anterior cingulate gyrus and the insula, contained less gray matter than those of the average healthy woman.Stefania had pled guilty to murdering her sister, burning the corpse, and later trying to kill her parents.Critics of the reduced sentence made compelling arguments that the neuroscience linking deficiencies in these parts of the brain to reduced inhibition and increased aggression was far from fully developed and that it was a real leap to use it to explain a particular individual’s actions.Moreover, they noted, Stefania’s brain had been compared with the brains of just ten other women.
These are legitimate concerns. Yet few who sounded the alarm thought to question the basis of Stefania’s initial sentence.
It seems obvious that a person who chooses to force-feed her sister lethal quantities of psychotropic drugs before setting her on fire deserves severe punishment. But what research is there to demonstrate the underpinnings of that intuition—that “guilty minds,” evil, free will, and so on actually exist?Our thoughts, beliefs, and actions are simply the product of roughly 100 billion neurons, each with its associated synapses, sending out and receiving neurotransmitters.If some of these electrochemical reactions