Looping effects of neurolaw, and the precarious marriage between neuroscience and the law

Abstract

In the following article we first present the growing trend of incorporating neuroscience into the law, and the growing acceptance of and trust in neuroscience’s mechanistic and reductionistic explanations of the human mind. We then present and discuss some studies that show how nudging peoples’ beliefs about matters related to human agency (such as free will, decision-making, or self-control) towards a more deterministic, mechanistic and/or reductionistic conception, exerts an influence on their very actions, mentality, and brain processes. We suggest that the neuroscientific view of the human mind exerts an influence on the very cognitive phenomena neuroscience falsely believes to be studying objectively. This holds especially when we consider the systematic integration of neuroscience into the public domain, such as the law. For, such an integration acts as a reinforcement of the public’s and legal decision-makers’ endorsement of and trust in neuroscience’s view of human nature that further changes how people think and act. Such looping effects of neurolaw are probably inevitable. Accordingly, we should be aware of the scope of neuroscientific explanations and be careful not to overstate neuroscientific evidence and findings in legal contexts.

The emergence of “truth machines”?: Artificial intelligence approaches to lie detection

“…For example, research on potential neuroscientific lie detection applications has often been presented with an optimistic tone (La Tona et al, 2020;Meijer & Verschuere, 2017), with confident assessments including "One day cognitive neuroscientists might perform the magic of accurate mind reading" (Moreno, 2009, p. 737). There is a temptation to evaluate lie detection and cognitive engineering efforts in ways that are readily challenged but that are deemed acceptable because of the perceived security and economic implications that successful technological applications might entail (Strle & Markič, 2019); for example, Schauer asks in relation to lie detection approaches "can bad science be good evidence?" (2009, p. 1191).…”

Putting Stress in Historical Context: Why It Is Important That Being Stressed Out Was Not a Way to Be a Person 2,000 Years Ago

“…In his paper, Hacking is mainly concerned with autism and multiple personality disorder, that is, with quite stable social categories and identities (for applications to other psychological phenomena, see, e.g., Thompson, 2017 ; Strle and Markič, 2018 ). In comparison to these phenomena, stress appears to be a rather temporary psychological state.…”

Trust, Automation Bias and Aversion: Algorithmic Decision-Making in the Context of Credit Scoring

“…And although ADM systems promise to reduce biases of decisions about credit scores, and the systems have more data available and a bigger processing capacity, the models employed are still human-made, mostly not user-centred, and thus criticized as biased [16], perceived to be unfair to certain individuals and can lead to negative feedback loops. For instance, some groups of people, to circumvent a negative credit score, even "play [...] the credit score game" [25; p.346], finding strategies to improve their credit score (also to enable upward social mobility [78]) by producing positive data; for instance, by joining lending circles where people lend money to each other without interest to build credit [85] (see also [86][87][88] for similarly created loops within systems, rich with social interaction).…”